imagined networks

Hey Girl- go get that glam! A final paper.

2009-12-09T13:17:00.000-08:00

Sorority life - its a presence and an ideal for many college women. Like the male-centered Fraternities, they promise communities that run deep with ritual, promise, and bonds that break the social fabric, a re-inscription of a new familial order. Within their 'houses' these spaces call upon 'sisters' to actively imagine a new family. There are even 'house mothers.'

In the age of postmodernity culture has pushed on the limits of these college campus groups rendering them an object to be adapted, transmitted, and represented in united states culture. Whether in film or television these 'real' houses are now haunted by the postmodern accumulation and projection of their media double. Yet media doubles never allow for the participation that a new double promises. This is Facebook and Myspace application/game Sorority Life.

Sorority Life is a game but also seeks to be more than that. Multiple blogs have popped up surrounding this participatory network of 'sisters' and their 'glam.' Beyond these blogs we find Facebook groups devoted towards extra-textual 'houses' where sisters imagine beyond the limitations of the game. These are simulated sororities of simulated sororities. More importantly these imagined sororities call for participatory political action of using apparel colors to designate the recognition of particular causes. For example, on certain wednesdays members of these extra-textual 'houses' wear pink for breast cancer awareness.

How can this application be understood. This paper will look at this application for its potential to conjure new groups and engagements beyond the game itself. What are the stakes of the imagined 'recognition' of causes? What history does such action have? How is this game a network? In what ways does it deconstruct and form new networks within the Facebook network itself?

The paper will turn to Fredric Jameson's “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Lee and Lipuma's “Cultures of Circulation,” Granovetter's “The Strength of Weak Ties,” and Terranova's “Network Culture.” These texts will act as tools for deconstructing the politics of this network/game.

-Sean

Final Thoughts...

2009-12-09T10:09:00.000-08:00

Race as a social construct that as manifested itself as a biological definition (preset definition) and how it's so integrated within our system there is an neverending circulation. [Wald, "Contagious" and Anderson, "Imagined Communities"]

OR

Analysis of Oldboy, and how technology generates an identity, and the assimilation of that identity into an imagined community. [Rafael, "Cellphone" and Lee & LiPuma, "Cultures"]

Final paper

2009-12-09T08:06:00.000-08:00

- BLOCKING (designated movement in a theatrical production, film, possibly dance, etc) as a set PATH

EXPLORE:
performativity of movement, spontaneity of walking, the production of a physical link between two distanced entitites

TEXTS:
Michael de Certeau, Lee and LiPuma, Snow Crash, Network Culture, Friction

Final Paper Proposal

2009-12-09T07:19:00.001-08:00

I plan to look at mass transportation in cities, specifically subway systems, to see how this form of travel affects residents' imagined and realized experiences of the city. I want to challenge De Certeau's rigid distinction between rail travel and walking through the city--I feel like mass transportation in some ways fills the gap between this binary. In what ways do the subways allow one to "map" the city, but through motion, not through vision, since the movement occurs for the most part underground (the antithesis of De Certeau's bird's eye view). How does the idea of walking-as-speaking become changed when the act of walking is transposed onto an underground transportation system in which the individuals that make up the crowd have many choices but their paths are notheless constrained by preexisting routes of travel. How does constant repetition of this movement (twice daily for most commuters) affect this experience, and does this simultaneous circulation of people parallel Anderson's notion of the newspaper as mass ceremony? I will look at De Certau, Anderson, Lynch, and possibly Jameson's "Cognitive Mapping."

Storytelling -- Nic Mooney

2009-12-09T02:08:00.000-08:00

Primarily drawing upon Anna Tsing's Friction, Jon Kleinberg's The Structure of the Web, and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, I'm interested in exploring how the virtual world not only projects popular (il)literacy on a mass scale, but also contributes to a culture of storytelling, not only in the more classic style of blog posts, but also in Facebook and Twitter updates, a lens that many peers freely admit they have begun to think of their days through. The awareness of an audience causes a narrativization of the everyday, a way of the virtual leaking into the physical. I want to tie this into the allegorical Bre-X story, namely the establishment of mythos as a form of self-promotion, thus relating back to websites' (and in Snow Crash, rafts') constant need to re-link and re-connect to stay afloat -- a perpetual need to assert identity. If one's storytelling is subpar, they receive little attention, and if their storytelling is sporadic or totally absent, they cease to exist in the virtual world -- Facebook even helpfully suggests you write on the walls of the inactive or unpopular, to see how they're doing. To stay alive in the virtual world, one cannot ever put both feet in the physical world.

2009-12-09T00:49:00.000-08:00

I plan on showing that the Community/Network, Map/Flow, and de Certaeu's strategy/tactic distinctions can be viewed can be viewed as the same binary opposition. At this point I feel it would be productive to problematize de Certaeu's move to classify the performative utterance of walking as both subversive as well as an arbitrary instance of parole. Can walking be subversive if it is simply a speech act chose within from the sea of referents that the elite delineate as space? I hope it will shed light on how communities and networks are related.

Another issue which could shape my paper concerns what de Certeau terms a mistaken simulacra, a god's eye view of a city, is this perspective, and more important the ideological functions which make the perspective possible, truly a 'fiction'?

Target: Map -> Action (Proposal)

2009-12-08T23:35:00.000-08:00

"…In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless… In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars…"

Human Rights activism has a narrative problem that is two-fold. First, as Thomas Keenan writes, "there is more than enough light [shining on human rights violators], and yet its subjects exhibit themselves shamelessly, brazenly, and openly." This failure to "mobilize shame" can be attributed to several things; the failure to create a universal rational subject, the existence of different systems of logic (one that reaches the conclusion that one should not be ashamed of violence and destruction), the assumption that human rights is in fact a correct logical conclusion; all of which seem unsatisfying and far too totalizing. The second issue is that, in attempting to shine light on the dark spaces created by violence and rights violations, NGOs can shock the viewer into a state of paralysis; such is Lisa Parks' complaint concerning the Crisis in Darfur layer in Google Earth, whose method of providing data and dates transforms the genocide into something that has happened as opposed to is happening. An addition (yet closely related) issue concerns the location of the U.S. in all of this (and not just the U.S. of the Bush years); "There a serious defect in the soul of Americans where we can’t rise to something new. Every nation has its peccadilloes, faults, and guilt. But that is in the past. Can’t we say that this is a new age, and the United States, especially after the collapse of Communism, has a whole new moral role?" (Robert Drinan, quoted from http://www.cceia.org/resources/transcripts/838.html) The use of "guilt" in this quote is rather remarkable, as is his assumption that, for American, these faults (evident in such acts as the overthrowing of El Salvador's Democratic government in the name of business interests, or the participation in Operation Ajax) can be overcome by the promise of the new. But what shape can that "new" take, especially when it seems as if the sorts of "shaming" the U.S. tries to accomplish in the international arena often serve as justification for military actions (Somali and Iraq being the two most obvious examples)?

The question outlined by these issues is this: how can abstract notions of human rights be actualized globally and justly? What sort of agency do we (the citizens/persons so important to the language of human rights) have to act for justice across the globe, or, if this global scope is impossible, locally? My attempt at outlining a method for solving these questions will examine the map, and the ways in which the totalizing map of Google Earth, whose use for matching, point for point, those injustices which have occurred (and, implicitly, have ended), has proved Useless, can be used to create a clear space, a need, for action. This involves both a bit of graph theory and the idea of a map that contains its own actualization, whose metadata (the geometry etched across the surface of the "natural" portion of the map) is continually updating and, instead of presenting a target that has already been "hit," presents a delineated field which can be acted upon through the insertion of the viewing subject. The ExtrACT project will provide impetus for the theory, serving as a test case whose various successes and failings can provide inspiration.

I will, of course, be drawing from Keenan, Parks, de Certeau, and Jameson; Appadurai, Tsing and LiPuma might make brief appearances, but will not play central roles, nor will their appearances entail exact mapping of their theories onto my project.

LADY GAGA: AFFECT, THE MASSES, AND THE MUTATION OF THE PATHOGEN

2009-12-08T23:12:00.000-08:00

Jordan Carter

QUESTION:

Are Lady Gaga’s postmodern hyper consumerist lyrics and videos—waxing pastiche and commodity culture—characteristic of Jameson’s pessimistic terminal stage of capitalism? Is artistic expression dead? Or, is Gaga a conductor of the masses? Does her music pack ration intensities of affect that compel free labor? If Gaga’s music is indeed a milieu of the masses, what sort of potential for social mutation lies within the turbulent flows of her media productions?

THESIS:

Although Lady Gaga thrives on consumer culture, commodification, and the surplus of surface, her art’s ability to manipulate the masses and divvy out free labor and ample affect suggests the possibility of a productive flow, and the potential for social mutation, namely through the valorization of the stigmatized homosexual community.

TEXTS TO BE ANALYZED:

Jameson's "Culture Logic of Late Capitalism"

Terranova's Network Culture

Wald's Contagious

“Lady Gaga the lady is as far-ranging as her music. She’s everywhere and always en route. One night at close to 12:30 she calls from somewhere in Europe -- even she doesn’t know where exactly -- and, after a few minutes, apologizes for having to hang up because her tour bus is about to enter a border crossing. She jets from London to Paris to Tokyo so quickly you think there must be more than one of her. There isn’t. And that’s probably a good thing too, for the world can only handle one Gaga at a time. To behold Lady Gaga is to withstand a sensory onslaught. “My whole life is a performance,” she proclaims, “I have to up the ante every day.”” (Excerpt from 2009 Out Magazine article, “The Lady is a Vamp”)

Indeed, Lady Gaga is a walking simulacra, an unending performance, a décollage of images, fashion, and and unabridged 'fame.' To Gaga, to be famous is not to be prestigious or high-class, but rather, to be 'glamorous.' ""I believe in living a glamorous life and I believe in a glamorous lifestyle,” says Gaga. “What that means is not money or fame or prestige. It’s a sense of vanity and glamour and subculture that is rooted in a sense of self. I am completely 100,000% devoted to a life of glamour."" Gaga's life of 'glamor' is characterized by consumption. In accordance with Jameson's postmodern diagnosis, Gaga is obsessed with the material--not in the Kantian sense of formal representation--but in the "schizophrenic dialect" of postmodernism: signifier forever detached from referent. Referent becomes empty. It becomes p[en to any and every interpretation—allowing commodity and art to be synonymous. Gaga has commodified herself, as well as her artistic production. "The Haus of Gaga ensures there are no loose ends to Gaga, just a lot of her. Every appearance and every utterance is a tightly choreographed performance. "I'm a method actress," she says proudly" ("The Lady is a Vamp").

Gaga is an image, and a pervasive one. She represents the "flatness" characteristic of Jameson's postmodern dilemma. Art has become mechanical reproduction, an onslaught of images of our commodity culture. People chase history by consuming its ever-fleeting images and accumulating reproductions and mass-produced mementos at museum gift shops. As Jameson notes, “we are condemned to seek history by way of our own pop images” (Jameson, 23). Not through “a priori” sources. New media such as TV, Radio, and the Internet facilitate this postmodern disavowal of the historical narrative. With the destruction of the narrative comes “the end…of style, in the sense of the unique and the personal, the end of the distinctive individual brushstroke (as symbolized by the emergent primacy of mechanical reproduction)” (Jameson, 15).

But perhaps there is more potential within this “mechanical reproduction” than Jameson cedes. Postmodern artists such as Warhol may mimic automated cameras, relying on the objective, on our collective “pop history” to present the spectator with an image of an image. They may crudely entertain laymen museum patrons with their sensational artwork, allowing them to feel the instant gratification of relating to a piece of art—however superficial that connection may be. Nonetheless, Warhol’s prints are fine art. They are overwhelmingly sensational, and yet, have the potential to incite cognition. Perhaps its because works like Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes, Duchamp’s Bottle Rack, and Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi" posit the spectator in a curious, yet familiar, setting. The viewer confronts stereoscopic images of reified culture. He recognizes aesthetic nuances of everyday commodities that he would have overlooked outside the boundaries of museum or online media galleries.

The pervasive shadows of materialism and pop culture “radical[ly] eclipse…Nature” (Jameson, 34). Culture subsumes nature. The two become one, as postmodernism flattens social reality: surface prevails, and various fragmented images of cultures circulate through the Internet and other forms of new media. Consumers are so obsessed and intertwined with the material—and the commodities they consume—that the two become inextricable. Consumer. Culture. Consumer culture. Nature.

Gaga is a freak of nature. She feeds on the masses by harnessing the intensities of pastiche and commercialism. She breaks from the limiting postmodern dialect of Jameson by inciting the affect and 'free labor' characteristic of Terranova's discourse in Network Culture. Indeed, there appears to be a mass “fascination” with Lady Gage—varying from love to hate—everyone feels some intensity towards the media object. People log onto youtube and give their free labor willingly, uploading her videos, commenting on her videos; altering, remixing, or imitating her cultural productions in a ‘performative’ manner that continuously alters her pop narrative by bridging the micro with the macro and contributing to the flow of her sporadic and turbulent image. In this manner, Gaga’s art carries a potential for mutation. "Lady Gaga is more like a collection of quotes than a singular performer,” Los Angeles Times music critic Ann Powers recently wrote. "She’s a human mash-up, a sample bank, recycled and reused.” Gaga boasts: “You’re only as great as your best references,” as her mini-movie video “Paparazzi” conveys, as she satirizes film noir, robots, and sheer opulence. She represents the turbulent flow of collaboration discussed by Terranova, and the connection between micro and macro facilitated by the "affect of the masses."

Gaga represents everyone and noone, everything and nothing. Her image is one of overexposure and hyper-inclusion--reality, or true 'representation' has been sacrificed. Although Gaga prides herself on her eclectic wardrobe, she has been spotted donning costumes made of glass and disco ball shards on numerous occasions. Wearing one such dress on stage at the Glastonbury Festival in England in June, the angular mirrored dress refracted the fervent faces of her fans, happily bouncing up and down. Each one sees in Gaga a reflection of him or herself, picking from her array of looks and melodies and messages those that appeal to them. Gay, straight, misfit, mall rat, teen, tween, or twink, look at Gaga and you’ll see yourself" ("The Lady is a Vamp").

Shot From Gaga's Out Magazine Photoshoot:

The potential within Gaga's network-reliant mass productions are most visible through their valorization of the gay community; through their valorization of the stigmatic, of the abnormal, of the diseased. No longer is the healthy population formed in resistance to the diseased or disease prone, as outlined in Contagious. In the case of Gaga, the abnormal, the anti-mainstream has become essential to the mainstream. Challenging Wald's negative dialectic of contagion, Gaga's music and the digital media that gardens it function as a positive enzyme, fueled by affect--catalyzing the formation of the masses.

"A life of glamour is an ethos to which every gay -- from the 17-year-old Dominican tranny voguing in his bedroom to the tanorexic middle-aged Miami circuit queen -- can relate. It’s one reason we (the gay community) love Gaga. Another, of course, is that Gaga loves us back. Gayness is in Gaga’s DNA...She did Ellen before Leno, performed in gay clubs before straight ones, and plugs the gays constantly in interviews, even those with straight publications" ("The Lady is a Vamp," Out Magazine).

final paper: fashion blogs

2009-12-08T22:11:00.000-08:00

For my final paper, I want to examine the imagined community of fashion bloggers, specifically the 13-year old blogger phenomenon Tavi Williams and her blog “style rookie”, and how this inherently networked community reconfigures the individual subject. My driving question, in essence, is: What is the role of the individual subject in the network of independent fashion bloggers? In one specific case, how does the transcendence of the blog of a 13-year old “style rookie” from network-fame to industry-fame position the network community with the real-life community? In other words, what happens when the fan rises to fame and how does that reconfigure the role of the network and the role of the individual within it?
I will tackle this question by first engaging the blog itself and how the individual functions within its postmodern construction. I will work with Jameson’s text on Postmodernism to analyze the specificities of the blog and how it relates to subjectivity and affect. One passage I have found relevant is:

“What replaces these various depth models is for the most part a conception of
practices, discourses, and textual play, whose new syntagmatic structures we
will examine later on; let it suffice now to observe that here too depth is
replaced by surface, or by multiple surfaces (what if often called
intertextuality is in that sense no longer a matter of depth” (Postmodernism 12)

Fashion blogs, as epitomized by the much-adored Style Rookie prototype, engage in a simultaneous replacement of depth by surface and a necessarily deep passion for the material that drives the process of free labor How does the passion and free labor of the blogger fit into affect’s supposedly waning state?

Therefore, I must connect Jameson to Tiziana Terranova and her analysis of the dynamics of network culture and free labor. I want to look at Terranova’s notion of the priviledging of process over structure and nonlinear flows of information.

In addition to engaging the specific blog (http://tavi-thenewgirlintown.blogspot.com/), I would like to examine the impact of her blog on both the blogger/fan community and the fashion community itself. Both are inextricably linked because her facilitation and augmentation of a networked community of individual fans (all under the mass of “fashion bloggers” who share a love for web-surfing and Comme des Garcons yet perform the act of posting regular assertions of individuality) led to her rise to fame and enabled her to re-influence the very community she worships. For example, Tavi has been featured on the cover of fashion magazines, interviewed for others, and one of her favorite lines, Rodarte, sites her has the influence for their new collaboration with Target. How does this actualization both limit and expand the reach of the imagined community?

A further question this will lead me to examine is: How does this interaction between bloggers and “actual” producers in/members of the fashion industry maintain or break down a performative hierarchy?

final paper

2009-12-08T21:55:00.001-08:00

The path of media through the internet is often created by the alteration of an original by a series of individuals who create interweaving paths and formations for the text. An original video, song, image etc is posted, assigned some kind of meaning and then made into countless alterations and reformations on its journey around the world wide web. As these texts are circulated, they are also being archived. This ‘path’ could be mapped in the same way the great garbage patch could – as a copy of something that never actually existed.

I would like to focus on perhaps one of these memes and focus on its ability to be mapped, and what can be gathered from its path and alterations.

What is lost or gained in the alterations and meaning formations that the meme takes on its path? (Can these changes/paths be seen in the same way as Tsing’s points of friction?)

What can be said about personal agency on a glocal scale? (ie what are the implications of an individual who creates an alteration to a global text and then re circulates that new copy on a global scale)

Is this another form of decentralized action? (as Keenan says about the use of blogs in Kosovo)

Could a meme be seen as a type of allegorical package that brings universals to the local through points of friction and misunderstanding? (Tsing)

Is this focus on circulating production and reproductions a productive or destructive force? (Lee and LiPuma, Tsing)

The Promise of... What?

2009-12-08T20:38:00.001-08:00

I was in conversation with a good friend who happens to run a prestigious student group on campus. We got to talking about publicity measures for our mutual groups (I run the theater board of Brown). His group deals with political activism, debate, and conversation and it often hosts important speakers in a packed Solomon.

I find his work in publicity and branding boffo, to say the least. The aesthetic is instantly recognizable and with that comes a certain aura of legitimacy. It got me thinking about how I contribute to a "promise" to my clients like the feeling I get when I see his posters.

Recently, I helped produce (with fellow MCM participant, Jamie) a video promoting a theater production, entitled "Doris to Darlene". My roommate, the director, was also responsible for crafting the show's poster (above). In what ways did we "promise" something and either deliver it, fail to produce, actively dissuade guests or fully confused others?

There is intention in sublimation. For example, the video promotes a silly, girl-group, lovey-dovey story. In fact, the play was very much the opposite. The story was full of abject heart break. The girl-group do-wop sound was also only 1/3rd of the piece. We intentionally dumbed-down the product. We even ironically added the tagline "Fall in love" when the characters slowly fall out of love with each other. Not that there was not an angle of selling the heartbreak but the "spectacle" (Tsing, 57) of the expected was too overpowering to ignore. By this I mean, by staging the incorrect, clients see what they want to see--a sappy story with singing, dancing, and love-making. There is spectacle in the cliche. We know what we want and we know what it looks like.

With regards to the poster, the pink record promises something different. The director commits to a sense of sincerity (the imposing needle has a seriousness about it). It also portends to twist expectations. Who has ever seen a pink record, before? "Who ever saw a black girl turn pink?" asks the script.

The "promise" has implicit lies to it. But aren't the lies expected to "perform" themselves? The act of a promise has the threat of falsity. At the same time, the promise has to be legitimate enough to distract from second guessing. I disagreed in section but now I see that "dramatic performance" as a prerequisite to economic performance (57) is necessary.

Is theater a product that utilizes tricky publicity tactics? Is there more implied subversion because of the art form? Why is it harder to just evaluate a work instead of spending hours abstracting it for consumption? In fact, my friend's group is moving away from abstraction in images. Their product does not entice more by obfuscating while mine obviously does.

Here's a more flagrant plug than this blog post. For more theater news click here.

Final paper: Santa Claus

2009-12-08T20:35:00.000-08:00

This idea was inspired by a conversation I had with my younger brother when he began to doubt the existence of Santa Claus. He told me that he couldn't believe that magical elves made complicated electronics like video game systems or computer games. I want to talk about the potential "death" of the imagined Santa Claus.

The general question that I will be answering is the following: How has the imagined Santa Claus myth become deconstructed by network culture/the post-modern condition/or capitalism?

I know that this question will have to be narrowed down much more from here.

Texts

The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Jameson-push back on canonizations of classics, aesthetic production as means of capitalist production

Appadurai

Tsing-Allegorical packages?

It seem as though the first half of the course might be more helpful for this paper. Please feel free to post suggestions!

final paper sketch

2009-12-08T20:26:00.000-08:00

Learningtoloveyoumore.com and making art in the information culture.

Terranova:
-Claude Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication:
-communication process: an information source
-transmitter
-the message
-the channel of communication
-the receiver

-Information cultures challenge the coincidence of the real with the possible.
-Network dynamics
-Free labor

Tsing:
-Gaps
-Collaboration

Lee and Lipuma:
-Performative identity
-Non-Capitalist circulation

Other resources:
Hal Foster The Artist as Ethnographer?
Claire Bishop Antagonism and Relational Aestheics
Allan McCollum Harrell Fletcher
Shelly Willis Teaching Public Art in the Twenty-first Century: An interview with Harrell Fletcher

Paper Topic: The Spam of Sam (w/ Interview)

2009-12-08T19:57:00.000-08:00

I plan to focus on my dear friend, Sam Yam. He is affectionately known as "S(p)am Yam" due to the amount of "spam" he sends his friends.

At this point in time, Sam is away from us at school. He still utilizes his discretion in sending messages (usually with a fantastical, titillating, or intriguing angle). But why does he spam? What is chosen to be sent and to which people?

Over the summer, Sam was subject to a project, entitled "S(p)am Sam Yam". It was envisioned by fellow MCM participant, and close S(p)am friend, Laurenneal. The conceit was to spam Sam with as much inane content as possible for 7 days straight. After this experiment failed (or succeeded?), Sam's cognizance about the performance of his role grew. How does "S(p)am" (an adopted name) become a performance of itself? How does he use technology to reach across physical and temporal boundaries? Is it spam, at all if he knows exactly who will receive and, subsequently read it?

As every message contains hidden recipients (through liberal use of the "bcc-" function), what is the community he has fostered? Who is hidden from the rest? Who is "imagined" to be included?

This paper will be in video conversation with Sam as his online presence increasingly grows. His recent acquisition of an iPhone keeps him in constant contact with those he wishes to be in communication with.

The paper will also examine how the writer (one of few who receives the most spam) has counteracted the excess with personalized emails of his own.

Inspiration will come from
1. Rafael -- How the individual can be a broadcaster
2. Terranova -- Free labor, knowledge as power/commodity
3. Kleinberg -- chains

-Nick White

INTERVIEW with SUBJECT: S(p)am Yam

Why do you spam?
I S(p)am to share. I value every piece of knowledge I encounter in life and feel the responsibility to share with others. If it matters to me, there is a great chance it will matter to someone else. The question is how often I have a hit with each individual of the contacts I keep. I S(p)am for the greater good, for the enlightenment of the majority over the minor inconvenience of the few.

How do you choose your material?
I never deliberately seek to S(p)am, nor do I intentionally hunt out data to flood your inboxes. I go about online as always, and it is only when I come across a fact, picture, quote, article, audio or video that has an impact on me that I consider sharing it with others. That is always the test. If it affects a change in me, I then save it as a draft of potential S(p)am. From there I usually let the material sit for one or more days, reconsidering it until I decide how to package it and deliver it to whom, or discard it forever.

Why and how do you choose people to receive it?
Each S(p)am is delivered through blind carbon copy to a unique set of recipients based on its content. There has only been one instance so far of revealing email addresses.
I personalize the actual list for each message from my inventory of contacts, one hundred and fifty and counting, selecting only the recipients that I feel will benefit, appreciate, share, laugh and learn from the information I am presenting. Am I forcing unwanted content or abusing the privilege of possessing someone's contact information? When it only takes a click to delete a message, I feel S(p)am is no worse than the constant advertisement we are subjected to throughout our lives, for example, though mine is tailored to individual characters from a personal connection.

Do you use it to reconnect with your friends?
When away from the people I care most about and whose company I enjoy, I feel that frequent, personal efforts of communication are more memorable and lasting than a single phone call or email every few months. Email allows us to be a part of each other's daily lives on our own time. People know that I am thinking about them when I take the time to send them something I feel they would enjoy or learn from, and they appreciate it even more when they can experience these communications at a time convenient to them. Though certainly meant to maintain a presence in the lives of others despite physical separation, I also garner a selfless pleasure from it all, which is especially true when sharing music.

Do you find your internet scouring (described hereafter as "free labor") selfless? Are you fulfilled by your work? How does your work (or "production") require/compel consumption?
Do I find my free labor selfless? Yes, to an extent. I do not have to spend my time compiling and delivering S(p)am, but I choose to because I like to receive personalized messages and also like sharing what I find. Yet is an email personalized if there are more than ten recipients? Twenty? One hundred? Not to the degree that an individual correspondence is, but certainly more so than breaking news alerts and eBay deals.
I am very much fulfilled by my work when it introduces a thought or creation to others that they had not experienced before or that they then reconsider in a new light. Yet I am also driven by a selfish desire to be associated with this dissemination, so that when they revisit this song or quote or image they think of me, in whatever fashion, and thus I enter their lives more often than I ever could only with my physical presence.
In most cases, the presence of media compels consumption more so than text alone ever could, a fact I capitalize on in S(p)am. At this point, an email without pictures, color or $(p)@m §ρeeκ looks naked to me. Yet by infusing each correspondence with media content, am I changing the recipient's perception of the text? Will this association carry on beyond the S(p)am? By default my work requires consumption. Text will flash before your eyes no matter how quickly you delete a message. Should you choose to open it, any enclosed media will appear and further impel you to read, click and view, as it should. If I did not want you to consume, I would never send you S(p)am in the first place.

What is the "value" of reading your emails? Interpret value as you will.
There is no inherent value in S(p)am with one exception: there is monetary value in correspondence that include a link to download music, since in most cases this is music I have purchased and that you are able to consume and share without paying. That said, if you value knowledge, as I do, and classify knowledge as any information regardless of merit, as I do, then you might be inclined to view S(p)am as possessing value. Acquisition of knowledge leads to understanding, and hopefully compassion, that which I value above all else.

Is your work a form of resistance?
Very much so. I resist banality. I resist systems, in particular the way we write. Meticulously structured and necessarily so, our writing system constricts us in ways we hardly ever consider. Perhaps the most lasting result of my experience with Chinese, I miss the imagery of our written word. The pictogram is gone. Part of my work is to infuse text with pictures, to address what cannot be addressed through words. Yet doing so changes the perception of the text, a point of obsession for me. The alphabet allows for abstraction. Words elicit different images from different people. Yet when I insert an actual image, I introduce a direct visual into your mind, generating resultant images that modify or perhaps block entirely what you might have otherwise seen.
I seek to provoke, to promote the vulgar, to combat the pristine. We are flawed, we are single, we are finite.

Do you find a "cultural exchange" in your s(p)amming?
Not very often, especially with my generation and younger. The courtesy and expectation of response has been lost with the advent of email. Only very strong reactions lead to a S(p)am reply from friends. What I do find is that frequent recipients are more likely to reciprocate and send articles, music and videos they think I will enjoy. However, this overall one-sided relationship has never deterred me from continuing to S(p)am. When I do hear reactions, they are overwhelmingly positive, and there have only been three requests to discontinue correspondence, two of which were a response to multiple text messages.
I will always encourage responses and value criticism of the form. We all love attention.

Do you ever want your work to incite action?
As I said, I want to incite knowledge and compassion. These in turn may lead to action, a desirable effect particularly with the political. I feel very strongly about issues I deem moral and care about my fellow man. If a piece of information causes you to speak up and fight back, I consider that a great victory, not so much for me but for the merits of communication. Although the Internet allows for vast amount of refuse, it also allows for the circulation of the truth. It allows the few to coalesce and combat greater tides of destruction. I care about openness, about candor. I am inspired by so much and feel a responsibility to share that inspiration. It does not die with me. It is magnified by the community.

Interview composed by Nick White on December 13th, 2009

Proposal bw

2009-12-08T19:45:00.000-08:00

Question: The phenomenon I want to investigate is amateur porn pictures on the internet, specifically the website lameatnames.com. As a quick background, the website is a random collection of amateur pictures found on the internet by the two founders, who met on the internet before ever meeting in real life. The descryption of the website reads as follows: "most of the time [the pictures] are not really sexy. they're fun cause they show people's life and what erotic means to them."On another page, the two founders describe what they are doing as filtering or archiving, specifically looking for the "beautiful." The site does not seek to make any money and it does not accept submissions. They link to only one other collection and one other blog, which is also their own. lastly, the image library is organized into categories that are alphabetically listed. Some categories are straightforward for example Christmas Elves) others are more poetic (Little Death). They also have a literature category.
After this lengthy explanation, let me explain why this has attracted my attention.

For me this brings up a host of questions: Why does this site exist and who is it for? What does it archive and for whom? Is this something new or is a productive rephrasing of something already there? Are there issues of ownership and intention that have to be discussed? What is at stake in taking private photos of people in sexual photos found on public internet sites and then organizing and showing them in a new way and in a new environment?

Literature used:
Tsing: Gaps as "conceptual spaces and real spaces into which powerful demarcations do not travel well" (p. 175). This is obviously interesting when looking at the wild 'frontier" of the internet, which is limitless and oftentimes escapes straightforward labeling.
Foucault: Secrets and Power. "Relations of power are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of relationships (…), but are immanent in the latter; they are immediate effects of the divisions, inequalities, and disequilibriums which occur in the latter, and conversely they are the internal conditions of these differentiations; relations of power are not in the superstructural positions, with merely a role of prohibition or accompaniment; they have a directly productive role; where they come into play."
Lee and LePuma about performance. This is interesting, since these pictures in a new order are not reproducing something, but by adding a new context actually creating something it.
Keenan on the visual and affect.
Granovetter on weak ties since the site is not connected with the rest of the internet. Can't really be found through other sites; however has a twitter feed and facebook site)
Potentially something about viruses, since the vocabulary about sexuality is filled with words that are also used to describe sickness.
More to hopefully emerge from the discussion.

Thesis: The site lameatnames.com manages to exhibit an unmapped space between public and private sexuality in reality and on the internet, and in the associated discourse. While its pictures are inherently private and through their aesthetic linked with the everyday life of "normal" people, they have all been found using the internet and are being redisplayed through it and thus available to all. The way that power works in real life, i.e. repressing non-heteronormative expressions of sexuality, does not transfer to the internet, where these pictures are now being reassembled and grouped together. In this grouping, they also create new meanings, since here sexuality and taboos are renegotiated and in this negotiation also created.

Final Paper

2009-12-08T19:34:00.001-08:00

For my final paper, I wanted to explore the tensions between the idea of an aesthetic (politics?) of cognitive mapping proposed by Jameson, and ideas of networks/masses/multitudes discussed by Terranova. If, as discussed by Terranova, masses are "the place of... dismediation," could any idea of "cognitive mapping" be possible? Could Jameson's concepts be reconciled with Terranova's conceptualizations, or possibly be adapted to them? And then, what's at stake (politically) in a discussion of Jameson and (versus?) Terranova?

Obviously I would plan on engaging Jameson's article and Terranova's text, possibly (depending on how things develop) Tsing and/or Appadurai (my ideas about my topic/paper are not fully formed yet, so there's still room for changes/developments.) Hopefully I'll have more fleshed-out thoughts to discuss tomorrow.

Final Paper

2009-12-08T18:57:00.000-08:00

What is at stake in the debates surround net neutrality?
de Certeau, Lynch, Terranova and Tsing.
Something to do with understanding how one's activities function within the network and how they intersect with the concept of net neutrality. I will attempt to explore ideas of what the internet is/has been, what it is not/has not been, and what it ought to be.

FINAL PAPER PROPOSAL: Transborder Immigrant Tool

2009-12-08T18:52:00.000-08:00

For my final paper I wanted to focus on a GPS tool recently developed by the Electronic Disturbance Theater aptly named the Transborder Immigrant Tool. Offered as an application that the developers are hoping to make available for free on the internet, the tool uses global-positioning technology to chart the best route for dangerous desert crossings in a hope to save those hundreds of those who die crossing the border each year, many lost or abandoned by guides.

What are the potentials and limitations of such a device in terms of what networks or community it makes possible? How can begin to think of these technologies (Google Earth, GPS, etc) differently in terms of their ability to be appropriated in counter-hegemonic activism?

I really wanted to explore the relation between flows and mapping in the context of border politics. How is each functioning? For example, technological advances and flows of capital and products have enabled the crossing of borders and like Kalau’s project, even illegal products like drugs are able to cross the border with relative ease. However, there are still both real and symbolic borders when it comes to ‘immigrants’. How is this tension functioning in relation to the local and what perceived ‘threats’ does the nation face? More specifically, what kinds of discourses emerge about such a technologies? For example, an Orange county local paper’s headline read, “Poll: 56% say border-crossing tool threatens national security.”

There are obviously a lot of readings that are relevant to this discussion. The theorists that I am considering focusing on are Rafael (technology as a means to navigate and the relationship between technology and political action), Terranova (particularly the discussion of the potential of tactical media and its influence in migrant media pg. 147-50).

Terranova – chapter Communication biopower

“The virtual movements of this early twenty-first century have offered a challenging glimpse of the political field opened up by communication biopower. A network micropolitcs able to traverse the global space of communication is not some kind of easy utopia, wher differences are allowed to coexist or go their separate ways – the domain of a blissfully unproblematic self-organization. On the contrary, it is the ways in which the global communication matric allows suck connections and organizations to take place that reveals the hard work implied. This scattering, this tendency to diverge and separate, coupled with that of converging and joining, presents different possible lines of actualization: it can reproduce the rigid segments of the social and hence its ghettos, solipsisms and rigid territorialities. And it also offers the potential for a political experimentation, where the overall dynamics of a capillary communication milieu can be used productively as a kind of common ground – allowing relations of compossibility as well as concerted actions” (156).

Still trying to work out my thesis. Will hopefully figure out more fully where I ultimately want to go with this. (areas that I am also thinking of exploring: visuality as a tool of biopower and the role of the map). Any questions, comments or suggestions would be much appreciated.

more information about the application found here.

Monica

Final Paper Ideas, Isabel

2009-12-08T18:37:00.000-08:00

Reconciling the National and the Cosmopolitan: Museums Then and Now

Museums have long been “identified as sites for classification and ordering of knowledge, the producing of ideology and the disciplining of the public” (Henning). Historically, museums served first as tools for exclusive nation building, erected as monuments to one nation’s wealth and superiority over another. Since their beginnings they have displayed a tension between the more democratic ideal of ‘art for all’ and the more selective power to distinguish high art from low, worthy from worthless. Yet they have also been valued as houses of multiculturalism, storing diverse histories and memory; each “room” of culture residing within a greater cosmopolitan unity, the “house” that is the museum. In this sense, they have networked peoples at a national scale as well as a multinational one, proving both vital and antithetical to nationhood. Indeed, today museums continue to mediate these national and multinational ideals, standing as testaments to their specific nation’s dedication to multiculturalism while also reinforcing the nation’s particular cultural values. In this sense their universal appeal to culture continues to both unify and disrupt public imaginings of community – a paradox that many museums still battle despite the ever-widening networks of our global economy.

These are my basic beginnings -- the ideas that combine elements from our course (nationlism, nation-builing and multi-national networks, imperialism?, cosmopolitanism). I look to explore their tensions at a historically vital site: the museum.

The sources I use will be as follows:

In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson establishes a precedent for the theory of nationalism by connecting the rise of print-capitalism (ie. the spread of newspapers) to the subsequent imaginings of nations during the 19th century. One can compare these rapidly circulating newspapers with museums: both sources of organized knowledge that produced ideology and both which disciplined as well as expanded the European public. So might we thus understand the trajectory of newspapers and their communities as we do museums? Might we look at museums as another form of media with the cultural strength to engage and disempower people as Anderson reveals, and most importantly, to embolden cosmopolitanism as Bruce Robbins understands it? Certainly with both the newspaper’s and the museum’s western beginnings each is limited and has proven dangerous. However antithetical nationalism may seem to cosmopolitanism, might museums serve as a site of the two ideals’ reconciliation?

This paper will seek to explore museums’ institutional roles as nation builders as well as how this network-forming role has changed with globalization, reaping cultural analysis from both critics.

My further questions / meeting tomorrow will hopefully help me think through this tension more complexly, delving for problems with the texts of Anderson and Robbins.

Final Paper Prospectus

2009-12-08T18:22:00.001-08:00

Questions: What are the possibilities and limitations of different modes of valuing network-based free labor? How do these kinds of free labor relate to capital, and how is this relationship imagined or managed by different forms of coding?

I'm building upon this blog post.

Expanding upon these questions, I'd like to examine up to 4 different ways of valuing free labor: User Labor Markup Language, which quantifies individual users' contributions through embedding code in social networks and produces metrics in this same code; MetaMarkets, which allows people to trade shares in their activity on social networking sites (for example, creating and selling shares of one's flickr account) for a fictive currency; Viral Loop, which purports to tell facebook users how much their profile and activities on the site are worth in US dollars; and Ramesh Srinivasan's Tribal Peace project, which places a qualitative value on its users' free labor in constituting a locally valid, ontologically fluid network and in accessing, sharing, or not sharing certain user-generated information with others (e.g. anthropologists, museum curators). Srinivasan also explores a quantitative method for creating an ontologically fluid network that relies upon the free labor in the form of responses to hundreds of questions about how similar certain categories (i.e. basket-weaving and culture) are.

My tentative hypothesis: I think that I will try to expand on my argument as I have it in the blog post, going into greater detail and limning the implications of the different forms of coding in each project. Opposed to the projects I discussed in my blog post, Ramesh Srinivasan's ontologically fluid networks take advantage of free labor outside the ontologically rigid formats of social networking sites. Tribal peace also allows participants to decide what information is and is not shared. The political value of openness is put into question by locating it within a history of anthropological and curatorial profit from their informants. Thus, the capitalization of free labor (or offering such labor to institutions who may capitalize upon it) is managed by human networks, imagined as geographically proximate human communities sharing a culture.

I'd like to further explore how human networks are imagined in Srinivasan's project, and I think that Monica's incisive question about the role of narratives in imagining the local will be tremendously helpful; I may examine the construction of culture in his project along the lines of my critique of Priscilla Wald's notion of culture.

Other issues that are or may become relevant:

-the relationship between different forms of coding and making free labor visible or legible, and how this relationship entails an epistemology or ontology.

Sources:

Terranova, Network Culture

"The power of communication and the media is not only the power of . . . forming a consensus . . . but also a biopolitical power, that is, a power of inducing perceptions and organizing the imagination, of establishing a subjective correspondence between images, percepts, affects and beliefs" (152)

-Terranova's use of Deleuze and Guattari's "percepts" and "affects" is interesting here, especially since I've encountered these terms previously in an essay of theirs on art. The slippage between perception and percept, affects and feelings, beliefs and becoming is interesting in light of D&G's strict separation of these coupled terms.

-This passage also highlights that communication is not a matter of merely rendering transparent, but of engaging with affect, the body, and epistemology or ontology ("organizing the imagination" and "establishing correspondences" – categories that are crucial to Srinivasan's project in particular)

Soft control as a "mode of capture of value produced by an increasingly interconnected and interdependent culture in as much as the latter is also an industry -- and hence a mode of labour" (128-9)

-This claim is fundamental for Terranova: forms of networked culture are also modes of labor—the society-factory. Her analysis of this phenomenon is certainly compelling, but I'd be interested in what a more fine-grained, locally attuned approach to the relationship between culture and labor might discover. (however, this may be a paper in itself)

Terranova claims that the "excessive value" of affective labor "can never be really reabsorbed in a logic of exchange and equivalence." (129) Understood in its fullest sense, the power of affective labor is "a power of making and remaking the world through the reinvention of life" (129).

-Inventing worlds has an important place for Srinivasan, and I'm interested in how this affectively motivated making of worlds links up with Anderson's nationalism based on love.

Tsing, Friction

I like that Tsing troubles Terranova's claim about common passions, opening space for frictive collaborations to produce political change (even if that change doesn't mean the same thing to everyone). I'm not exactly sure where this point will fit into my analysis, but perhaps it would lend viability to Srinivasan's project, since he is so engaged with the incommensurability of different forms of knowledge.

Tsing's point about scale-making projects may also be a useful way to read how subjectification comes into play in something like Viral Loop, and how community comes into play in Srinivasan.

Spectacular accumulation is another point worthy of analysis, and I would think it comes into play in something like Google's purchase of YouTube for $1.65B. It also seems to be fundamental to the logic of advertising on social networking sites.

This proposal is already terrifyingly long, but hopefully we'll be able to focus the project a little bit more in our meeting.

Flash Mob?

2009-12-08T18:22:00.000-08:00

SciLi 10pm

High Visual Capital and the Immodest Eye

2009-12-08T18:14:00.000-08:00

In my final paper, I will focus on google earth, and the pleasure and power derived from a panoptic, subjectifying gaze. The first text I will use is Spatial Practices, in which de Certeau describes how 'totalizing and immoderate human texts' allow for a 'disciplinary space'. I want to next apply de Certeau's voyeuristic fantasy to Google Earth, and specifically Lisa Parks', "An Analysis of 'Crisis In Darfur,'" as the project "deputize[s] the user/citizen as a monitor on global patrol situated at a strategic interface" (Parks, 5). According to Parks, it also "demonstrates a preoccupation with the power to visualize rather than to develop coherent policies that may lead to peace in the region" (5).

With this in mind, I pose the following question: Beyond voyeuristic pleasures, what power do we give the unequal gaze in the quest for order, discipline and peace? The rationale behind "Crisis in Darfur" was that "expanding the use of remote imagery might help convince potential perpetrators that their actions against civilians will not go unnoticed by the international community" (Parks, 4). This is where I will evoke Keenan's "Mobilizing Shame."

The idea of weight of 'actions unnoticed' echoes Bentham's 1785 design for panoptic prisons, in which, at any moment, the prisoner could be watched and would therefore alter thier behavior accordingly. These structures will serve as a physical metaphor for the unannounced eye of Google Earth somewhere in the paper.

2009-12-08T17:00:00.000-08:00

Anonymous is the final boss of the internet. Anonymous works as one, because none of us are as cruel as all of us. Anonymous is the enemy of Anonymous. Anonymous is your family and friends. Anonymous is not your friend. Anonymous has no identity.

Encyclopedia Dramatica explains that "Anonymous is not a person, nor is a group, movement, or cause: Anonymous is a collective of people with too much time on their hands, a commune of human thought and useless imagery." It refers, in this usage, to a vague community of the frequenters (most often posting anonymously) of various internet message boards (especially imageboards) and a few other websites. In many aspects, the culture associated with Anonymous is wholly unique, and its relationship to the ideas of Imagined Communities and Imagined Networks are interesting to examine. Its very nature, and self-defined traits, put it at odds with many traditional ideas of community, network, and, to some degree, many schema for human interactions.

I intend to examine what is central to the idea and, if such a thing exists, definition of Anonymous and, by extension, examine the phenomenon of the "Cancer" that many members feel is "killing" the culture. By considering some of the central traits and common threads of Anonymous through Anderson's Imagined Communities, while also drawing from Terranova, Stephenson, and Gibson on can, perhaps, come to an understanding of exactly what Anonymous means. Then, one must analyze the self-described "Cancer" through the lens of Wald's writing on outbreak narratives, to come to an understanding of the pathologies that are "killing" Anonymous. This all leads to the question "How does the 'Cancer' of Anonymous relate to its unique relationship with the concept of a community?" The differences between the outbreak narrative of "Cancer" among Anonymous and more traditional outbreaks in the physical world, viewed through the tropes Wald observes in Contagious, can lead to a better understanding of Anonymous in relation to other communities by elucidating the aspects in which it diverges from most other communities and those in which it does not.

The Drug War

2009-12-08T14:49:00.000-08:00

For my final paper, I plan to take on the Drug War. I plan to use Tsing's Friction, specifically the chapter "The Economy of Appearances" and Lee and LiPuma's "Cultures of Circulation." The question: How can we use these theories of performativity to illuminate the great harm the drug war causes? My thesis: The war on drugs is a great specter. In the face of countless statistics which say it is a failure, it continues. This war illustrates the extensiveness of the American police state both at home and abroad.

repositioning of maps

2009-12-08T08:09:00.000-08:00

Lisa Parks’ talks presented some very provocative concepts on the repositioning of maps and satellite images in terms of power structures. What I found interesting about her paper was her call for the change in direction of the look at maps and at satellite images. She is accepting the inevitable saturation and utility of satellite imagery in our society, and stressing the subsequent need for questioning it. Her idea to change the symbol of the pinpointing (zero-ing in) arrow addresses the need to reposition the act of searching through satellite in the power dynamics of control and domination through imagery. This is an aesthetic object that both carries physical and ideological weight in its un-questioned state.

On a practical level, I just have trouble understanding how she sees this change from acceptance to interrogation being done outside an academic setting, if she sees that at all. Redirecting the look is a large task, especially as google maps/earth seems to become ubiquitous and naturalized as a form of truth. But on a smaller level, her talk has changed the way I personally (a blindly avid user of Google maps) will approach satellite imagery—with a question as to how the image reflects back on my perceptions of location and power.

Paglen similarly repositioned maps and imagery—to space. I found myself questioning how his geographic “blank spots on the map” related to spacecrafts that can only really be seen by 70 year old satellite trackers and large state apparatuses. Additionally, how do the MiTex spacecrafts that are specifically designed to be invisible relate to the geographic positioning of secrecy? Is there a difference between a government blackening out pieces of land that by definition exist and creating “invisible, undetectable” mechanisms of destruction? both really circle the same notion of “blank spots”, yet the notion of a blank spot in space seems much mores frightening to me because space is much harder to map and conceive in the first place.

I'll Show You

2009-12-08T06:47:00.000-08:00

I had to think about performativity when listening to the talks on archives. Especially the ones about archiving music where pertinent, as it was clearly shown how these archives, by collecting things without use that would have been thrown away, in the action of collecting were creating a community of sorts. This was also true for the artwork that collected stories from female prisoners and drug users, which by exhibiting the stories was creating the voices. However, what was interesting is the boundaries that these examples showed, since these actions of archiving always seemed to focus on the underprivileged or obsolete. In these examples, what is actually done is that the archivists voice is detached from the things archived and he or she seems to be speaking for people or communities. This is most clear in the prisoner example, but even with the LPs, meaning is assigned to an object that the collectors felt very differently about than the original users.
The question is, what is actually being archived? In these cases I think it was not what was originally there but a interpretation phrased differently what was perceived to be originally there. However, I do not want to criticize this, since i think it is the only way to approach the subject and it manages to challenge our assumptions of archives and especially museums. By showing the position occupied by the collector and by the archive (in these cases a record label to enable consumption and an activist piece of art), these position are not assumed. Whereas a museum often in its definition has some kind of defining authority over its archives even when it allows its visitors to read the objects in different ways, these archives also reveal that was s archived is an act of choice.
The records collected did not aim to show the most popular LPs or even the ones most worth saving fro aesthetic reasons. They were the most eclectic and the ones most interesting to the collector. They were saved since they could find a niche and be marketed to a certain audience. What is preserved is not the original intention of the author, the original community they were made for or the context they were created in. What is being preserved is how they are read today.
Similarly, the voices exhibited in the artwork, were always shown to be deeply connected to the artist. She narrates the introduction and the conclusion and treats herself in the same way she treats her subjects, i.e. viewers can jump over her voice or jump to certain sections of her introduction that seem pertinent.
So what I think these examples managed to show is how performativity can be done for certain people as well and the limits and dangers in this.

Animating Archives

2009-12-08T05:43:00.001-08:00

I was not able to attend as many sessions of the conference as I would have liked but one notion that I unfortunately did not see but was recounted during the closing round table was the idea of "save" versus "save as." Rather than simply engage at a level of the loss of materiality of the thing that is digitally archived this dynamic presents new and interesting ways to conceive of data. The act of "save" versus "save as" seems to reconstitute a materiality in the digital. It also plays an important role in suggesting that the archive remains at the center of politics of choice. The archive as "saved" represents an update, an addition or subtraction of elements that cover the preceding archive. As "saved as" this allows for a constitution of multiple archives in favor of a singular destructive process. It calls to question the ways in which copies with even miniscule differences result in a new archiving. This constitutes almost an archiving of archives. Perhaps more can be elaborated on the original talk that gave way to this notion.

Capitalism is a SERIOUS joke.

2009-12-08T05:30:00.000-08:00

Anna Tsing's Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection presents an interesting account of the problems that arise due to the 'friction' surrounding the rainforests of Indonesia. One of the most fascinating annectdotes in her work is the narrative and history Bre-X, the Canadian mining company who conjured spectacular amounts of capital on just a promise. This promise, a spectacle engaged on the scale of the globe resulted in a process that Tsing Defines as Spectacular Accumulation. Tsing exposes the terrifying notion of this mode capitalism. She states, "Spectacular accumulation occurs when investors speculate on a product that may or may not exist. Investors are looking for the appearance of success. They cannot afford to find out if the product is solid; by then their chances for profit will be gone...economic performance is conjured dramatically" (75).
While this model is extremely helpful in addressing the task of reconstituting the terms of the global and globalization away from a "conflict" or "clash" of cultures towards "friction" her diagrams do not. These serious but joking diagrams make this reconstitution nothing more than a serious joke. In attempting to play away from some absolute declaration, this step causes the argument to be opened to unnecessary weakness. I am not entirely sure if we are to take her work seriously. But who am I even joking...

Projects

2009-12-08T01:45:00.001-08:00

From "social projects" to "universal projects," I am extremely intrigued in what we mean when we say "project." Inherent in the word itself is a notion that some universal not only exists, but must be localized to become effective (i.e. the 'direct' and/or 'immediate' implications of the "project"). Also potentially valid is the consideration that in imagining/inventing/executing a "project," we also send, or project or deploy a conception, a potential universal or ideology on an extended, global scale.

Is it possible to commit to and/or execute an action on a private level without a public resonance? Is the personal (or small) always inherently political (or indicative of a greater 'universal' and/or have ideological implications)?

Where might the body, the physical, be situated here?

Vertical Realities

2009-12-08T01:33:00.000-08:00

Lisa Parks pointed out in her talk that Google Earth participated in "patchwork censorship", whereby, at the behest of governments and organizations, satellite images of Google Earth are replaced by older images in order to conceal certain developments such a black sites and secret facilities. Besides the obvious fear that regular viewers using Google Earth are not informed of this fact and thus assume the images they view are real, it also points out an important point brought up by Michel de Certeau's "Walking in the City" - sometimes, looking down from above, one cannot make sense of what is happening "on the ground". What one assumes to be reality, as viewed from our computer screens, may look very different when seen from below.

Trevor Paglen knows this well; in his talk, he mentions photographing secret CIA facilities, made invisible on any map by the US government in the interest of "national security". It is only by walking the streets that Paglen is able to find out what is actually present; as Lisa Parks shows us, Google Earth can misrepresent actual geographies for political reasons. Mapping has traditionally been a process involving much back and forth between the macro and the micro - explorers traverse new territories, then combine their piecemeal knowledge to form a larger map. However, with the advent of satellite imagery, it is no longer necessary to actually visit the location in order to map it. Paglen and Parks both call for a return to more traditional methods of cartography as a means of verifying what is produced by satellite imaging. However, the problem lies not with the technology itself, but the censorship it undergoes. Reality is obscured by the changes that Google Earth makes to its images in order to protect certain locations, and because of this, the only method of finding whether the macro-scale image we are given is real is to traverse into the micro, and then project the micro back onto the macro, in what Lisa Parks describes as something like a reverse shot.

Additionally, I am intrigued by her argument for vertical, rather than horizontal histories, but not entirely sure if I understand what exactly a vertical history entails.

Jeanine

AA

2009-12-08T00:56:00.000-08:00

Tara McPherson's contribution to the ending discussion really grabbed my attention. I was mostly interested in her assertion that, in paraphrase, "academics tend to privilege their side of the binary" She further states that we must move beyond that using the tools critical theory has given us. I am curious as to how such an act might affect academic discourse, in this "good" progression do we risk a simple and reductive narritivization of the polysemic flow that she seeks to preserve? Furthermore, would this be achieved by merely stating the existence of the opposition? Would/Could there be an attempt to step away from the binary mode of thought?

Through the discussion of how to expand what can be academic research I thought of De Certeau's analysis of how those subscribing to the dominant ideology often fear catastrophe if their modes of understanding are threatened by emerging perspectives. The task of changing what can be viewed as academic research is perhaps a meta-interdisciplinary revision of "theories of misfortune [to the ruling class]"

Friction creepy crawl catch-up

2009-12-08T00:25:00.000-08:00

In partial response to Patrick's essay "The Ethics of Overreaching: Metaphor and Encounter" --

LAUREN!!!

I too found the notion of metaphor compelling.

"Gaps develop in the seams of universal projects; they are found where universals have not been successful in setting all the terms"(202).

Tsing goes on to note that "whenever we want to trace the limits of hegemony, we need to look for gaps," as "an ethnography of global connection is impossible without this tool."

I consider here her use of the word 'connection' and find it indicative of the encounters (as opposed to representation) of which you write. I agree that misreading Tsing's work as being focused primarily on representation (or even the limits of representation) has destructive and retroproductive potential; as I believe we often situate our examination of global/local/glo(c)al interactions ourselves too rigidly in the two entities set apart from one another rather than setting our investigation in the distance between them.

For there is distance even in friction, as two entities wrenched across one anothers' surfaces do so because they cannot fully consume, erase, or surrogate the other. Of course, their interaction (or encounter) produces another thing all together: a sort of dialectical explosion at the stitches of an ambivalent event.

So, what is productive about hegemony? What is productive about the universal, or, rather, conceptions of universals?

Tsing notes that "the concept of freedom is much abused, and yet the idea of freedom is still as important a tool as any for the disenfranchised"(203). It seems that an empty, useless 'universal concept' / 'universal human right' called freedom is made palpable by the very thing which complicates it: plurality, its myriad meanings in a single moment (thanks to a multiplicitous human population) and its myriad meanings across time (thanks to an evolving human population and the environment(s) working to (re)produce the species).

"White People Stole My Car"

2009-12-07T23:11:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure how many have heard of this phrase, but it has become one the most popular searched phrases on Google, due to a controversial picture that surfaced not too long ago.

This past Summer, when one searched for the phrase "white people stole my car", it appeared that Google would ask "Did you mean: black people stole my car". There was the misconception that Google was actually racist. Even if the picture was genuine the blame would lie with Google users themselves. Google, as Tanmay mentioned, keeps track of the most popular phrases used for searches, thus search results would only reflect what your peers have done.

Although it has been argued that the original picture, which created such heated debates between internet users, is actually a fake it has been enough to manipulate Google users to generate a "spammination" of the phrase. The phrase has become so popular and searched so many times on Google, it has even forced Google to actually make it impossible recreate the picture posted above.

Images can so easily trigger a chain of reactions.

Not Just Open / Source

2009-12-07T22:41:00.000-08:00

During the Session 2 lecture, there was a lot of discussion of ownership and authorship. Where does ownership lie, when authorship is disputed due to collaborative efforts? When it comes to open code and source, there are so many contributions made and authorship belongs to no singular person, thus ownership belongs to no particular. This allows for growth and collective development among a community.

Lawrence Liang lectured on the Alternative Law Forum, which deals with a lot of things, one focus being on intellectual property. For example, they oppose the Indian Copyright act, because it could hinder creative innovation.

Open source allows collaborative efforts to one work that could positively affect a group. The old saying, "Two heads are better than one", has yet to be inaccurate, even in this sense. Collaborative efforts bring communities closer, possibly the global into a local realm and bring about a overall growth within the community. The internet makes these things very possible; fostering a community where information is accessible, but also allows redistribution of said information.

Although such communities and information can be manipulated by larger corporations. Considering the issue of authorship and ownership that is always brought into question, due to the vast amount of collaboration it is easy for larger outside power to manipulate accordingly. Once an idea can be seen as profitable, it would become easy for a larger company to claim such an idea, if ownership cannot be assigned.

I'm not entirely sure where I was going with this... but open source sounds great for cultural development, but a risk for those involved to be manipulated by an outside force.

targeting google earth

2009-12-07T21:25:00.000-08:00

In her talk on ‘Targeting Google Earth,’ Lisa Parks explained how the study of satellite photographs and the terrain of Google Earth must be expanded to include a vertical, sort of off the page, historical reading that incorporate what and whose satellite took the picture, who paid for it, what was erased and the players involved in its production. She also said that it was vital for more media literacy as the expanse and use of virtual media grows. I feel like these two points from her lecture highlight imagined spatial implications for virtual media. First, the path or network that leads to the creation of virtual images. Second, the community that is excluded from the political discourse because of the new emphasis on virtual media due to lack of access/education to the technology. Given these two spaces/communities/networks that Parks notes are created in virtual images like Google Earth, issues of power, subjectivity and access are all called into questions. It seems like positions of text and producer are blurred into a reading where a text can be seen more as a process (with specific temporal and spatial paths).

How does this vertical and more historical definition of satellite images merge the identity of the people behind a text with the text itself? Do they become inseparable? Or is this notion of blending community and text itself just an element of all the imagined communities we have been investigating?

caught up: Reading on Product Capital based on Tsing's Investment Capital Theory

2009-12-07T18:35:00.000-08:00

Although, Tsing’s assessment of the global economy is most concerned with investment capital, some of the theory can be applied to product based capital.

In order to gain investors, start up companies and potential tourist locations use performance as “a necessary aid to gathering investment funds” (57). “Profit must be imagined before it can be extracted; the possibility of economic performance must be conjured like a spirit to draw an audience of potential investors” (57). Performance of economic potential is integral to investment capital.

Ciroc, Sean Comb’s vodka brand, is heavily advertised to an audience that is both supposedly hip and urban or would desire a hip and urban lifestyle. The product is a package deal; a lifestyle is included with buying a bottle of Ciroc vodka. This concept is relates directly to Terranova’s discussion of microsegmentation. She states that in network culture difference has been packaged and sold as part of the capitalist system.

A similar exchange is made when investing capital. The instant return is the promise of capital (a promise that is dependent on performance through advertising). The long-term investment is hopefully more capital. An imagined promised is packaged with the actually capital.

An imagined lifestyle accompanies a bottle of Ciroc vodka. Imagined capital accompanies actual capital. In product capitalism, the imagined return of the product (the Ciroc Urban lifestyle) can never be measured while the promise of investment capital can be realized.

-Jamie

Re: Frontiers

2009-12-07T18:23:00.000-08:00

I want to continue to examine Tsing's concept of the frontier, or the 'space that embodies its own impossibility,' first by comparing it to the section in de Certeau's Spactial Practices, "Marking out Boundaries," and then looking at the frontier's implication for Prof. Srinivasan's lecture this weekend.

I was interested to see that both de Certeau and Tsing imagine space, marked boundaries, and frontiers with the vocabulary of performance. Accroding to de Certeau, the process of marking out boundaries, "has a distributive power and performative force. [...] It founds spaces" (dC 123). This process creates 'a theatre of action' in which, according to Tsing, landscape becomes a 'lively actor'. At the same time, it "authorize[s] the establishment, displacement, or transcendence of limits, and as a consequence, set[s] in opposition, within a closed field of discourse, two movements that intersect" (dC 123). With this view of the frontier, de Certeau reiterates Tsing's concept of friction and opposing movement.

I found Prof. Srinivasan's presentation at Animating Archives to be very interesting and provocative. In fact, while I was thinking about the concept of frontier, I started questioning whether spatial demarcations and the subsequent friction produced could serve as a metaphor for the conflicting ontologies he presented. Tsing describes how "roads are a good image for conceptualizing how friction works: Roads create pathways that make motion easier and more efficient, but in doing so, they limit where we go. The ease of travel they facilitate is also a structure of confinement. Friction inflicts historical trajectories, enabling, excluding, and particularizing." (Tsing 6). Like both frontiers and roads, limited ontologies offer to one a structure of power, and to another, a dead end, or structure of confinement.

Like Aaron mentioned earlier on the blog, the collaboration between the Cambridge University's Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology and Prof. Srinivasan challenged the distinct and privileged ontological systems used to achive Zuni cultural products. Aaron said in his post, "The implication was that using rigid definitions separated certain narratives from the objects in display leading to pictures that... skewed things a little." A system that uses rigid definitions not only stifles diversity, but also invents a cultural product separate from its story, in the same fashion that the frontier invents separate spaces.

Embracing incommensurability can be likened to end of a frontier, or the common point of separation. In this scenario, there no longer exists a 'mouthpiece of the limit' (dC) who holds a position of power. Such a revolutionary shift could be likened to another spatial metaphor: that of the bridge, which according to de Certeau, 'distinguishes and threatens insularities' and finally represents the 'betrayal of an order'. The "legitimate space and and its (alien) exteriority" (dC 126) does not become the same, but rather re-imagined, this time in the context of Tsing's 'technofrontier, the endless frontier' (31), that makes revolutionary new forms of dynamic achives possible.

Late Posts

2009-12-07T16:22:00.000-08:00

Terranova

Tragedy of the Creative Commons

The internet can be conceived of as a series of tubes. Better yet, a public highway system trafficked with information. Sitting at ones computer, an illusion is brought about as one surfs the internet. It seems as though the totality of human knowledge is at ones finger tips. We are free to move about, clinking link after link, chatting and connecting with people all over the world, irrespective of geography and time. However, this system connects a mass of private/public networks and computers linking people (users) to each other and a variety of producers and, increasingly today, conglomerators of content. It brings together fragments of society into a common space through a massive network. "The Internet, that is, seems to us to capture (and reinforce) a feature of network culture as a whole – the way it combines masses, segments and microsegments within a common informational dimension in which all points are potentially even if unevenly affected by all other points" (153). The Internet has a distinct geography. The URLs that we input into our browsers point to specific IP addresses that give discrete locations within the network. When I go to the Brown University website I start off in Rhode Island, connect in New York, then Boston, and arrive at my final destination, back in Rhode Island. We send requests to a server and packets of information are sent back and reassembled within the GUI of the computer. Too many requests from independent networks and users can result in a denial of service to all users (Twitter is down!). The nation of Qatar, which uses one IP address for all traffic out of the country, was banned from editing Wikipedia articles after a number of malicious edits.

I decided to trace the paths of my connections to a few websites I frequently visit. First, through my own standard internet connection then with a Brown VPN connection. Attempting to traceroute to www.nsa.gov directs me to a non-functional pi address. Furthermore, my connection is timed out for an indefinite amount of time and I eventually terminated the process. My last stop, AT&T (http://news.cnet.com/AT38T-sued-over-NSA-spy-program/2100-1028_3-6033501.html). In the other cases, connecting to Brown VPN resulted in a more privileged connection, my browser taking a more direct route to their destinations and pages loading faster. The most extreme case in visiting Brown’s own website; I never had to leave the local network. It seems the internet produces its own unique geography, separate from that of the physical world. Far from being a classless, open, field of endless informational flow and discovery in which all users are anonymous peers with equal access, the internet has begun to reproduce the very political, and structural elements of informational flows in the physical world. We've come upon a new “political field that cannot be made to unite under any single signifier (such as the working class) or even under a stable consensus; while at the same time it cannot really split off into separate segments with completely separate socio-cultural identities (even hybrid ones) – a space that is common, without being homogeneous or even equal” (154). The blank spots, such as the NSA, the higher status connections of a distinguished university, the traffic jams and flows, all traversing a the same network.

As the content evolves and demands on the network have become greater, the limits of informational flows come increasingly under debate. Should so-called bandwidth hogs, free riding of the rest of the reasonable customers, pay more? When all information is split into packets and transmitted without regard for content or meaning, should we devise ways to privilege certain information? Are we heading towards a digital iteration of the Tragedy of the Commons?

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

www.brown.edu or 128.148.128.180

traceroute to www.ciswip.brown.edu (128.148.128.180), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets

1 wireless_broadband_router (192.168.1.1) 1.220 ms 0.636 ms 0.543 ms

2 l100.prvdri-vfttp-13.verizon-gni.net (96.238.59.1) 4.517 ms 4.495 ms 4.619 ms

3 g4-0-213.prvdri-lcr-02.verizon-gni.net (130.81.133.160) 4.551 ms 5.510 ms 4.151 ms

4 p11-0-0.prvdri-lcr-01.verizon-gni.net (130.81.27.66) 13.264 ms 9.581 ms 8.896 ms

5 so-3-3-0-0.ny5030-bb-rtr1.verizon-gni.net (130.81.29.28) 10.055 ms 9.130 ms 8.770 ms

6 0.so-3-1-0.xt1.nyc8.alter.net (152.63.10.33) 13.574 ms 14.041 ms 14.184 ms

7 0.so-6-0-0.xl3.nyc4.alter.net (152.63.16.221) 14.210 ms 13.616 ms 13.222 ms

8 0.xe-7-0-0.br2.nyc4.alter.net (152.63.3.166) 16.614 ms

0.xe-4-2-0.br2.nyc4.alter.net (152.63.3.110) 14.362 ms

0.xe-5-0-0.br2.nyc4.alter.net (152.63.18.5) 14.691 ms

9 xe-10-2-0.edge2.newyork2.level3.net (4.68.110.233) 15.635 ms

204.255.173.54 (204.255.173.54) 14.407 ms

4.68.110.105 (4.68.110.105) 14.961 ms

10 vlan51.ebr1.newyork2.level3.net (4.69.138.222) 14.356 ms 13.948 ms 14.230 ms

11 ae-4-4.ebr1.newyork1.level3.net (4.69.141.17) 14.869 ms 14.676 ms 14.252 ms

12 ae-1-8.bar2.boston1.level3.net (4.69.140.97) 24.727 ms 18.472 ms *

13 ae-0-11.bar1.boston1.level3.net (4.69.140.89) 19.544 ms 18.980 ms 19.697 ms

14 ae-7-7.car1.boston1.level3.net (4.69.132.241) 19.973 ms 20.529 ms 18.552 ms

15 oshean-inc.car1.boston1.level3.net (4.53.48.162) 19.288 ms 20.066 ms 19.157 ms

16 host-198-7-224-6.oshean.org (198.7.224.6) 28.117 ms 27.400 ms 27.913 ms

17 host-198-7-255-38.oshean.org (198.7.255.38) 28.139 ms 28.721 ms 27.962 ms

18 wilson-r.net.brown.edu (128.148.130.3) 30.028 ms 32.196 ms 29.874 ms

19 * * *

20 128.148.128.253 (128.148.128.253) 30.351 ms 28.997 ms 28.047 ms

21 * * *

22 128.148.128.253 (128.148.128.253) 29.026 ms !H * 30.929 ms !H

VPN

traceroute to www.ciswip.brown.edu (128.148.128.180), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets

1 128.148.9.65 (128.148.9.65) 32.506 ms 29.422 ms 28.028 ms

2 cit-r.brown.edu (128.148.130.2) 29.961 ms 30.085 ms 28.838 ms

3 fred-wilma.net.brown.edu (10.1.64.105) 28.278 ms 31.343 ms 29.130 ms

4 128.148.128.253 (128.148.128.253) 33.867 ms 29.432 ms 31.845 ms

5 128.148.128.253 (128.148.128.253) 31.661 ms !H 29.616 ms !H 29.568 ms !H

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

www.google.com or 66.249.80.104

traceroute to www.l.google.com (66.249.81.104), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets

1 wireless_broadband_router (192.168.1.1) 3.892 ms 0.828 ms 0.550 ms

2 l100.prvdri-vfttp-13.verizon-gni.net (96.238.59.1) 5.161 ms 4.894 ms 3.885 ms

3 g4-0-213.prvdri-lcr-02.verizon-gni.net (130.81.133.160) 4.243 ms 4.589 ms 5.709 ms

4 p11-0-0.prvdri-lcr-01.verizon-gni.net (130.81.27.66) 8.209 ms 8.210 ms 8.262 ms

5 so-3-3-0-0.ny5030-bb-rtr1.verizon-gni.net (130.81.29.28) 10.677 ms 11.009 ms 8.537 ms

6 0.so-3-1-0.xt1.nyc8.alter.net (152.63.10.33) 12.586 ms 14.337 ms 14.322 ms

7 0.so-6-0-0.xl3.nyc4.alter.net (152.63.16.221) 14.373 ms 13.782 ms 17.146 ms

8 0.xe-5-0-0.br3.nyc4.alter.net (152.63.16.181) 17.809 ms 14.049 ms

0.xe-8-1-0.br3.nyc4.alter.net (152.63.17.53) 15.681 ms

9 te-7-1-0.edge2.newyork2.level3.net (4.68.127.21) 13.999 ms 13.287 ms 50.224 ms

10 vlan52.ebr2.newyork2.level3.net (4.69.138.254) 13.558 ms 14.878 ms

vlan51.ebr1.newyork2.level3.net (4.69.138.222) 17.427 ms

11 ae-6-6.ebr4.newyork1.level3.net (4.69.141.21) 20.140 ms 17.118 ms

ae-4-4.ebr1.newyork1.level3.net (4.69.141.17) 14.877 ms

12 ae-64-64.csw1.newyork1.level3.net (4.69.134.114) 17.204 ms

ae-81-81.csw3.newyork1.level3.net (4.69.134.74) 14.144 ms 27.835 ms

13 ae-1-69.edge1.newyork1.level3.net (4.68.16.14) 16.078 ms

ae-4-99.edge1.newyork1.level3.net (4.68.16.206) 14.375 ms

ae-2-79.edge1.newyork1.level3.net (4.68.16.78) 14.674 ms

14 google-inc.edge1.newyork1.level3.net (4.71.172.86) 15.872 ms 14.887 ms

google-inc.edge1.newyork1.level3.net (4.71.172.82) 14.722 ms

15 72.14.238.232 (72.14.238.232) 16.080 ms 18.495 ms 19.454 ms

16 * * *

17 lga15s01-in-f104.1e100.net (66.249.81.104) 16.994 ms 17.432 ms 15.467 ms

VPN

traceroute to www.l.google.com (66.249.80.104), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets

1 128.148.9.65 (128.148.9.65) 29.252 ms 28.097 ms 28.081 ms

2 128.148.130.101 (128.148.130.101) 28.763 ms 29.391 ms 29.576 ms

3 host-198-7-224-37.oshean.org (198.7.224.37) 30.310 ms 28.482 ms 29.826 ms

4 gi1-1.ccr01.pvd01.atlas.cogentco.com (38.103.240.1) 104.801 ms 163.031 ms 51.120 ms

5 te4-1.ccr01.hpn04.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.2.1) 34.051 ms 35.264 ms 36.182 ms

6 te1-4.ccr04.jfk02.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.24.241) 39.889 ms 33.393 ms 35.881 ms

7 te8-4.ccr02.jfk05.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.26.66) 35.267 ms 34.542 ms

te7-4.ccr02.jfk05.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.3.70) 39.384 ms

8 core1-0-0-8.lga.net.google.com (198.32.118.39) 35.620 ms 35.051 ms 35.430 ms

9 209.85.248.180 (209.85.248.180) 36.257 ms 36.805 ms 36.802 ms

10 * * *

11 lga15s03-in-f104.1e100.net (66.249.80.104) 36.807 ms 37.008 ms 33.988 ms

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

www.facebook.com or 69.63.181.16

traceroute to www.facebook.com (69.63.181.11), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets

1 wireless_broadband_router (192.168.1.1) 1.090 ms 0.594 ms 0.557 ms

2 l100.prvdri-vfttp-13.verizon-gni.net (96.238.59.1) 7.490 ms 5.252 ms 4.188 ms

3 g4-0-113.prvdri-lcr-01.verizon-gni.net (130.81.133.152) 7.604 ms 4.094 ms 4.300 ms

4 so-3-3-0-0.ny5030-bb-rtr1.verizon-gni.net (130.81.29.28) 8.789 ms 12.537 ms 8.785 ms

5 0.so-3-1-0.xt1.nyc8.alter.net (152.63.10.33) 12.859 ms 17.135 ms 12.545 ms

6 0.so-6-3-0.xl3.nyc4.alter.net (152.63.0.69) 13.041 ms 15.319 ms 14.386 ms

7 0.xe-4-2-0.br2.nyc4.alter.net (152.63.3.110) 14.358 ms

0.xe-7-0-0.br2.nyc4.alter.net (152.63.3.166) 54.124 ms

0.xe-3-2-0.br2.nyc4.alter.net (152.63.3.126) 14.687 ms

8 204.255.173.54 (204.255.173.54) 63.313 ms

xe-10-2-0.edge2.newyork2.level3.net (4.68.110.233) 14.549 ms

4.68.110.105 (4.68.110.105) 18.045 ms

9 vlan52.ebr2.newyork2.level3.net (4.69.138.254) 13.676 ms 13.934 ms 13.245 ms

10 ae-6-6.ebr4.newyork1.level3.net (4.69.141.21) 22.111 ms 18.372 ms 15.633 ms

11 ae-2.ebr4.sanjose1.level3.net (4.69.135.185) 94.498 ms 89.243 ms 88.676 ms

12 ae-94-94.csw4.sanjose1.level3.net (4.69.134.254) 89.946 ms 88.915 ms 90.274 ms

13 ae-44-99.car4.sanjose1.level3.net (4.68.18.198) 85.021 ms 83.950 ms 84.442 ms

14 facebook-in.car4.sanjose1.level3.net (4.71.114.122) 93.897 ms 97.897 ms 93.163 ms

15 ae1.bb01.sjc1.tfbnw.net (74.119.76.23) 94.645 ms 113.038 ms 94.764 ms

16 ae4.br02.snc1.tfbnw.net (74.119.76.26) 98.453 ms

ae4.br01.snc1.tfbnw.net (74.119.76.24) 109.211 ms 94.579 ms

17 eth-18-17.csw01a.snc2.tfbnw.net (204.15.23.195) 93.574 ms

eth-18-1.csw01b.snc2.tfbnw.net (204.15.21.125) 96.858 ms

eth-17-1.csw01a.snc2.tfbnw.net (204.15.22.1) 93.591 ms

18 www-10-01-snc2.facebook.com (69.63.181.11) 96.412 ms 97.402 ms 94.970 ms

VPN

traceroute to www.facebook.com (69.63.181.15), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets

1 128.148.9.65 (128.148.9.65) 29.297 ms 28.273 ms 28.574 ms

2 128.148.130.101 (128.148.130.101) 33.518 ms 29.711 ms 28.092 ms

3 host-198-7-224-37.oshean.org (198.7.224.37) 29.610 ms 29.718 ms 29.746 ms

4 207.210.142.245 (207.210.142.245) 29.454 ms 30.984 ms 29.272 ms

5 207.210.142.2 (207.210.142.2) 36.000 ms 36.271 ms 35.497 ms

6 xe-1-1-0.br01.lga1.tfbnw.net (198.32.118.27) 38.321 ms 40.673 ms 34.129 ms

7 xe-2-2-0.br01.ord1.tfbnw.net (204.15.22.66) 58.439 ms 60.378 ms 59.375 ms

8 xe-0-1-0.br02.pao1.tfbnw.net (204.15.20.50) 113.707 ms 111.384 ms 114.601 ms

9 xe-9-1-0.br02.snc1.tfbnw.net (204.15.21.98) 143.218 ms 112.253 ms

xe-9-1-0.br01.snc1.tfbnw.net (204.15.21.94) 114.319 ms

10 eth-17-17.csw01a.snc2.tfbnw.net (204.15.23.239) 115.737 ms

204.15.21.75 (204.15.21.75) 112.227 ms

eth-17-1.csw01a.snc2.tfbnw.net (204.15.22.1) 113.652 ms

11 www-12-01-snc2.facebook.com (69.63.181.15) 112.227 ms 112.370 ms 114.937 ms

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

ATT and the NSA

traceroute to www.nsa.gov.att-idns.net (12.120.172.8), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets

1 128.148.9.65 (128.148.9.65) 30.705 ms 27.970 ms 29.651 ms

2 128.148.130.101 (128.148.130.101) 29.502 ms 29.485 ms 28.900 ms

3 host-198-7-224-37.oshean.org (198.7.224.37) 30.031 ms 32.054 ms 28.283 ms

4 gi1-1.ccr01.pvd01.atlas.cogentco.com (38.103.240.1) 29.900 ms 29.242 ms 29.516 ms

5 te4-1.ccr01.hpn04.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.2.1) 34.285 ms 33.631 ms 32.326 ms

6 te1-4.ccr04.jfk02.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.24.241) 34.276 ms 35.266 ms 36.238 ms

7 te2-2.ccr01.jfk07.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.1.218) 34.799 ms 35.461 ms 35.233 ms

8 192.205.36.77 (192.205.36.77) 35.585 ms 35.002 ms 40.018 ms

9 cr2.n54ny.ip.att.net (12.122.81.70) 35.778 ms 36.607 ms

cr1.n54ny.ip.att.net (12.122.81.58) 35.671 ms

10 gar8.n54ny.ip.att.net (12.122.130.1) 35.222 ms

gar8.n54ny.ip.att.net (12.122.131.1) 36.769 ms 38.183 ms

11 * * *

12 * * *

13 * * *

14 * * *

15 * * *

16 * * *

17 * * *

18 * * *

19 * * *

20 * * *

21 * * *

22 * * *

23 * * *

24 * * *

25 * * *

26 * * *

27 * * *

28 * * *

29 * * *

30 * * *

31 * * *

The Dragon

2009-12-07T13:58:00.000-08:00

I found Trevor Paglen's lecture on geo-stationary orbits absolutely fascinating. Although his talk didn't heavily emphasize a basis in theory, Paglen really maintained his style of narrative-driven exploration that I came to enjoy in Blank Spots on the Map. Since the lecture, I've often found myself thinking about the gravitational belt that surrounds the earth, where in awesome amount of satellites that rotate with the earth, matching the speed of the earth's rotation, thus remaining absolutely stationary over specific spots in the earth's geography. The lecture brought up obvious concerns about security and public knowledge, surrounding so called "black operations" run by the government that launch relatively small, technology-heavy satellites into the GSO. These new satellites are equipped with boosters that allow them to precisely position themselves anywhere in the GSO, raising concern about the motives behind the project. Interestingly, I was not struck by the amount of technology that the government hides from us as citizens, for we've discovered this in the media, Paglen's book, and Galison's Removing Knowledge. The government has been hiding technologies from us for a very long time and, although I am undoubtedly concerned about the location of power in these instances, I feel like in many cases, the government's selective removal of technical knowledge from the public has much unreached potential (both devastating and productive). This is where I was truly effected by the lecture- technologies are tools that are operated and motivated by humans, so there must be an ultimate goal or reason for creating them. So, technological gadgets (satellites for example) can remain ultimately useless without the right reason or motivation for their use, empty goal-less vessels if you will. I am not concerned about the government's ability to hide these technologies from us, for I sincerely have no use for them, but I am concerned about the government's motivation, reasoning, and anticipated use for the technologies. Here, Paglen really revealed important clues as to the mindset behind these secret projects by presenting the patches that the government assigns to the "black operations." If I recall correctly, one patch portrays a ferocious green dragon with US-flag-patterned wings, and large, pointed fangs clutching a globe in its talons. The dragon's tail snakes behind the globe and cradles, at the end, a large crystal clear diamond. How are we supposed to interpret this disturbing array of symbols? The dragon can only mean the US government, and it's clutching the world! Not quite the motivation that I had pictured... And the dragon is cradling a diamond- a valuable resource that has caused bloodshed across the world (and undoubtedly connotes economic value, thus capitalism and desire). The technologies are scary because of their potential, but the patches are even worse. I can't imagine giving a nuclear bomb to a ferocious dragon that wants to control the world and all of its resources... Even worse- it has the knowledge to operate it.

caught up: Terranova and Bookchin

2009-12-06T23:31:00.000-08:00

Tiziana Terranova writes “It has long been appreciated by science that large numbers behave differently than small numbers. Mobs breed a requisite measure of complexity from emergent entitles. The total number of possible interactions between two or more members accumulates exponentially as the number of members increases. At a high level of connectivity, and a high number of members, the dynamics of mobs takes hold. More is different.” p. 106

I think this lack of difference was what was disappointing about Natalie Bookchin’s presentation. Bookchin collects footage from You Tube and show us the similarities of people’s posting from videos of road trips, to dancing to the same song with similar moves (maybe from the original video) and people talking about fear of the economy and anti-depressants, which serves a momentary interest but end as quickly as the life of the video. The story stops there as well as the data she collected on how many views for each video was canned when the video was edited. Although she has put the videos back on You Tube it’s gestural since the compositional format of the video breaks them into bits that are hard to see and limited from the internet technology. With a little more effort and a common digital media software Jitter, to name one method since there are many, it would have been possible to have the video data pulled from the internet data updated in real time, as in the how many times viewed, point back to the connectivity with the community.

Although a very well edited and choreographed video and an interesting look at what is posted on the internet, I question when the free labor of internet is harvested for material and placed out of context is this act similar to when Terranova compares the “people shows” of the TV networks and the new Web does this replicate the TV capitalism with the art market. Perhaps not in a monetary sense but maybe in the cultural economy? “In a sense, they manage the impossible; they create monetary value out of the most reluctant members of the postmodern cultural economy; those who do not produce marketable style, who are not qualified enough to enter the fast world of the knowledge economy, are converted into monetary value through their capacity to affectively perform their misery.” p. 95

The Natalie Bookchin lecture is available here:

And if you missed Jonah Brucker-Cohen it can be viewed here.

Meta: Map -> Target

2009-12-06T22:15:00.001-08:00

Unfortunately, I was unable to attend much of the conference due to various things such as classes and radio shows. I did make it for two sessions though: Lisa Parks and Trevor Paglan, and a very collaborative session on new archive/analysis procedures. Since my planned essay is essentially a critique of Parks, I'll comment on her presentation.

For those not present, I'll provide a brief summary. At the center of her lecture was the idea that, in a post-nuclear time, the world has been imagined as a target. Satellite images allow us to view the world from above, leaving the surface to gain a somewhat totalizing view. The satellite can obtain images from anywhere; the images obtained are transformed into targets, targets of things such as surveillance, destruction, or development (a quick note: it seemed in her speech as if these were *the* three possibilities for targeting, but from speaking with Parks afterwards, it seems as if she wants to leave this more open, that these three methods of targeting are only part of a realm of methods). When the U.S. military has released images from Iraq or Afganistan displaying the aftermath of a bombing, the arrows used to draw our attention, guide our interpretation are, in a way, the same arrows used to guide the bombs before the final image was taken.

Afterwards, I asked her a question: if the satellite image is produced in the creation of a target, what do we make of composites of these targets (such as Google Earth), where the user is suddenly left with a multiplicity of targets with no arrows to guide interpretation, a gaze from above that is no longer singular? Parks briefly responded by noting that the satellite image does not so much represent the creation of a target, merely the potential for a target. To translate a bit: Google Earth is not a composite of 'targets,' specifically, but rather an extension of a field of potentiality across the entire surface of the Earth. Any point, any image can become a target, but is not already one.

But there's still something in my question that remains unanswered: how does this potential become actualized? Or rather: what sort of function can we identify to map a potential to a target of force (or rather, to map targets of force over the field of potentials)? While Parks spoke of "reversing the target" to point back towards the viewers (think of Laura Mulvey's article on foregrounding the gaze of the camera and the audience), something that certainly works for appropriating military images (images that are already targets), the totalizing gaze of Google Earth (which cannot exclude, only distort) and metadata interface allowing users to bind together groups of locations based on an interpretative operation form a gap in Parks' lecture, something assumed but not explored. The way in which targets can be generated by the creation of groups of metadata, which must be discovered before they can add arrows and markers to the Earth, and may be generated by anyone and are all presented equivalently, complicates (but does not necessarily negates) Parks' target reversal. Because Google Earth sells itself on completeness (you can locate all of your old houses in the images, even take a look at "empty" spaces of ocean), the effects of this overwhelming field escapes the control of the military and governments, despite their ability to persuade Google to distort sections of the map, creating new methods of actualization and counter-actualization. This is something I think Parks provided a framework for but perhaps did not explore: borrowing from her lecture, specifically her analysis of military satellite photos released to the public, we may say the target is not created by the image, but rather by the metadata, the arrows guiding interpretation. What is interesting about reaching this point in this fashion is that it is no longer just the military who creates targets; the creation of targets is very much the "actualization of the map" de Certaeu speaks of, the method through which we may identify locations to physically (or intellectually) interact with (or rather, act on as they act on us). I will begin to address these issues in my final essay. Look for the proposal Wednesday.

On another note, I feel like people have already accomplished significant feats of target reversal. One example: Chris Csikszentmihályi spoke of a project where deaths in Baghdad during the occupation were mapped onto Boston, where the artist moved about wearing a backpack containing a computer comparing locations, spewing out leaflets in memorial of those civilians killed collateral to the war when her location matched the location of a death. Without reading the pamphets, I can't testify to the ability of the work to affect a broad spectrum of civilians implicated in the project, but the idea itself is a very moving use of (reverse?) mapping, the confusion of center and periphery.

catching up again: Chris Csikszentmihalyi and some scattered thoughts

2009-12-06T22:04:00.000-08:00

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it” Alan Kay

Csikszentmihalyi said:
-technology is one of the most undemocratic process in Western culture.
-advancing technology only reinforces the status quo.
-technology was created by labor
-all technology is political but the politics are dissimulated in practice.

These statements remind me of the how technology incites human imagination. Sometimes for a brief moment as in Vincente Rafael example of cell phones used in 1995 in Manila, can be used for the gathering of “promise of justice’s arrival.” And sometimes the failures as in Lisa Parks article on Google Earth and “Crisis in Darfur” and in the end what it reveals, “how humanitarianism is intertwined with digital and disaster capitalism, and encourages us to recognize that high visual capital cannot resolve global conflicts”

And a little detour but in Tisng’s book Friction, she shows how the by classifying flower and seeds created a systemization later used for human cultures.

“Today, newly discovered plants are members of a pre-established scientific set: the plant kingdom, with its constituents families, genera, and species. They are self-evident elements of Nature and thus of little abstract interest. This success in reducing mysteries to facts speaks to the transformation of consciousness involved in making universality, and the global scale, self-evident. Botanical classification was an important catalyst for this transformation.

A key feature of this transformation was the erasure of the collaborations that made global knowledge possible. European botanical knowledge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was gained by learning from Asians, Africans, and indigenous Americans who introduced Europeans to their native plants. Botanical treatises from this period acknowledge the centrality of these knowledge exchanges. As European power grew around the world, however, European botanist came increasingly to imagine themselves as communing directly with plants—and the universality of science—without the mediation of non-European knowledge. The very collaboration that had made this science possible was covered up, and the plants were asked to speak for themselves as elements of Nature.” p. 91

catching up: Pricilla Wald Contagious and Biopolitics

2009-12-06T21:13:00.000-08:00

The outbreak narrative discussed in Priscilla Wald’s book Contagious points to the control of the population through regulations or biopolitics. On p. 3 “Outbreak narratives and the outbreak narratives have consequences. As they disseminate information, they affect survival rates and contagion routes. They promote or mitigate the stigmatizing of individuals, groups populations, locales (regional and global), behaviors, and lifestyles, and they change economies.” And this is important in relations to what the population has become as Foucault in The Repressive Hypothesis said “One of the great innovations in the techniques of power in the eighteenth century was the emergence of ‘population’ as an economic and political problem: population as wealth, population as manpower or labor capacity, population balanced between its own growth and the resources it commanded.”

Wald refers to Foucault and how the narrative needs to be circulated to continue the myth on p. 58, “Biopolitical strategies, however, are neither self-evident nor static; they must be made meaningful and continually reproduced. And they evolve as they help to transform political and social formations. Constituted by and circulating through media, narratives produce that meaning, which is never stable. The narratives depict networks and affiliations on varying scales: local, regional, national, global. The relationships that comprise ‘populations’ or ‘ecosystems’ or ‘networks’ are always in flux; even if they are imagined biologically, they can be variously defined.”

Wald concludes the chapter how infectious disease has served as a tool to shape the imagined community. On p. 67, “If epidemiologists map the imagined community of the global village, charting infectious diseases as they cross national borders, the depiction, as much as management, of those diseases reinforces the boundaries. The use of disease to imagine as well as regulate communities powerfully enacts the most anxious dimensions of national relatedness. The inextricability of disease and national belonging shapes the experiences of both; disease assumes political significance, while national belonging becomes nothing less than a matter of health. With their powerfully defining ambivalence, those terms mandate the dangerous necessity of the stranger and the representational technologies by which that stranger is brought into the community.”

Walter Benjamin in his essay On the Concept of History writes “To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize ‘how it really was.’ It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.” “For both it is one and the same: handing itself over as the tool of the ruling classes.” “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘emergency situation’ in which we live is the rule.”

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing Friction: gaps, collaboration and hope

2009-12-06T21:11:00.000-08:00

Gaps are always being produced as discriminations are made. p. 196 and sometimes these gaps are productive to gather people to activate.

Tsing briefly mentions the cause to save wild Orangutans on p. 240 and so I want to look at her text through the organization Orangutan Outreach, that I shamefully am plugging on behalf of my friend who runs the organization and Willie Smits efforts to regenerate a rainforest for orangutans and the local community. The narrative of these loveable animals and Willie Smits is in line with the allegorical package of the frontier hero that Tsing speaks of in her text.

Tisng writes “Cultures are continually co-produced in the interactions I call “friction”: the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference.” p. 4 “Collaboration is not a simple sharing of information. There is no reason to assume that collaborators share common goals.” p. 13

Willie Smits a forest engineer and conservationist has successfully regenerated 2,000 hectares of rainforest that had been destroyed by fire to repopulate the area with orangutans in their forest habitat. He did this by finding plants that the local population could use to increase their income and not destroy the forest with palm sugars. The results are quite amazing and you can watch his TED video for more details but he has coordinated a collaboration of many individuals have worked together with different goals that so far has been a success.

Watch the video here: Willie Smits on TED talks

Orangutan Outreach is one of the outlets that tell the narrative. Visit the site and if you are looking for holiday gifts maybe you will consider adopting an orangutan.
www.redapes.org

incommensurability and interdisciplinarity

2009-12-06T19:45:00.000-08:00

I'd like to address some issues that came up on the last day of the Animating Archives conference. I'll start with three short summaries, since we did not all go to the same talks:

I. Incommensurability

Ramesh Srinivasan's talk on creating technologies for local communities raised issues of knowledge, classification, and ontology. Following Monica, I'd like to emphasize that the incommensurability of different forms of knowledge is crucial to his work. Forms of knowledge differ not only in their content, but in how content is organized, indexed, and searched (that is, the project is as much about metadata as it is about data). Srinivasan noted that many databases and archives stifle diverse knowledge in favor of stability; in opposition to this trend, Srinivasan proposes rhizomatic forms of networked, complex systems that privilege emergence over stability. (This raises some interesting questions for me about the maintenance of a traditional knowledge-base on one hand and the hybridity of new forms of knowledge on the other, but I'll leave this to one side for now).

II. Interdisciplinarity

Speakers at the conference held a mind-boggling array of degrees and professional identities--artist-activist-theorist, programmer-ethnographer, jewish sound archivist blogger--but I think my favorite was Tara McPherson's self-styled epithet: "recovering interpretive humanities scholar." McPherson's comments during the wrap-up panel called for new operating systems,both literal and figurative (critical theory and poststructuralism were characterized as OS's in need of updating and patching) and new literacies that would promote hybrid practices; or, more colloquially, new ways of working that will help us to "shake ourselves out of our boxes." Interdisciplinarity was McPherson's watchword, her cure for what ails academia.

III. Counterpoint and Weak / Strong Montage

James Chandler posed a methodological question to the group, citing Dominick LaCapra's critique of new historicism, which he labels a "weak montage" of juxtaposition without a strict structure. Chandler contrasted weak montage with "strong montage" and/or "contrapuntality" (I'm not sure if the two are equivalent). The latter notion comes from Said, and Chandler emphasized that counterpoint involves independent voices in tension, parallel autonomies operating within a structure. The final form of Chandler's question was: what do the models of contrapuntality, weak montage and strong montage accomplish for scholarship?

IV. Professional Associations

During the question and answer session, McPherson discussed that her working group will be making presentations to various professional associations about what kinds of academic labor can count for research and teaching credit. She cited the MLA's new wiki project as an example of how MLA members have the opportunity to rethink academic labor in light of new technologies, and encouraged the audience to contribute to this document.

In light of this series of episodes from the conference, I'd like to highlight a tension, a possible divergence and regrouping of the elements in the constellation I've presented: on the one hand, hybrid practices, interdisciplinarity, fruitful juxtapositions and anecdotal theory; on the other, disciplinarity, professional associations, incommensurability and more structured theories of counterpoint. McPherson's comments distilled this tension for me, for out of the same mouth came equally lively exhortations to "shake ourselves out of our boxes" and to aid professional associations in coding emergent forms of technological labor. Or, in Srinivasan's paradigm: what if different forms of professional practices and knowledge are incommensurable? In Chandler's parlance: in new hybrid practices, are different disciplines' methods and insights merely juxtaposed, or are they brought into a contrapuntal structure?

I don't have an answer for this question--indeed, it seems that it's a question that cannot be decided in advance (or "in theory"). It seems to me that the tension between interdisciplinarity and professionalism, between the productivity of new modes of scholarship and the difficulty in gaining professional recognition for this new kind of work, between forging connections among divergent knowledges and insisting on the incommensurability of different knowledges, reflects the pleasures and anxieties of playing at/with boundaries. I find that disciplines are somewhat artificial on the level of knowledge (there are sociologists who are more like certain anthropologists than they are like certain other sociologists), yet they are also material structures with stakes in what kind of knowledge is legitimated, valorized, and disseminated (the sociology and anthropology departments' budgets are separate, each hires its own faculty, maintains its own journals). There is also a disconnect between disciplines and departments (some would say that International Relations is a department that engages several disciplines). If, indeed, we need interdisciplinary or undisciplined scholarly work, should that work move outside the university (or has it already)? A quote often attributed to Henry Kissinger claims that "Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small"--”is interdisciplinarity a lower-stakes issue than forging ties outside of the university structure?

What's Lost in Satellite Imaging

2009-12-06T19:10:00.000-08:00

Re. Lisa Parks' Lecture Zeroing IN: Infrastructure, Datalands + Viral Videos

I found Lisa Parks and Trevor Paglan's lecture thoroughly interesting -- they raised particularly relevent concerns about issues of surveillance, which though the Bush regime has past and such paranoia has probably fled most of our minds, are still frightening and enthralling.

Parks spent much of her time discussing the orbits of the satellites at work, concerns of their control and also of truth of the information we receive. She talked bout the redevelopment of this new frontier and its potential for the eradication of communication infrastructure.

Yet what I found most interesting about her talk was her insistence on repeating a motion outwards & upwards: a motion into outer space, a target on Google Maps that confronts viewers off and out of the page, the orbits of machines around the earth . What I'm getting at is a sort of new agency, a motion and power of this new communication infrastructure that seems far beyond us, that seems - even in the verbs it demands to describe itself - to create something new, to establish a new kind of motion.

Yet what Parks didn't acknowledge in her albeit short speech (maybe because it was too obvious or maybe because she hadn't thought of it-- hope for the latter...) was that there is a simultaneous erasure occurring .

Both her lecture title "ZEROing In..." and her subheading, "CLEARcutting Communication" hint at this. In this projection outwards, this new agency and action that is creating a new field of communication, there is much being erased, much being reduced to zero, much being cleared.

So what might it be?

Certainly human agency. Maybe human lives -- the aerial images of post-strike Afghan/Iraqi targets completely "zero-ed" to the ground, that is, reduced to nothing. ... What are we clearing or letting be cleared away in these satellite images that allegedly protect us?

The Ethics of Overreaching: Metaphor and Encounter

2009-12-06T18:12:00.000-08:00

Theory has followed its own specifications. In overcoming the parochialism of the case study, theory overreaches to show each local situation as nothing more than an exemplification of a self-fulfilling global scheme (Tsing, 266, emphasis mine).

Tsing accords an important place to "friction" in her book of the same name, as commentors before me have pointed out. I would like to explore how friction is and is not a metaphor in her text, and what the stakes are for reading this concept in different ways.

The quotation above characterizes the problem with theory as one of overreaching. This term struck me as I read, for it engages with the etymology of "metaphor": from Greek metapherein via the French métaphore, "to transfer" or "to bear across." Metaphor is a figure of speech that attributes a property to an object to which that property is not literally applicable. Thus, metaphor is something that carries an attribute from one situation to another--it connotes travel & effort. Theory overreaches, Tsing claims, by eliding the specificity of the local, making it into a mere example of a global process. Yet her book puts forward the metaphor of "friction" to examine a host of cultural phenomenon, thereby wrenching the term from its specificity in the physical sciences. "Overreaching" is at once a powerful and dangerous move for Tsing. In the case of "friction," a certain kind of overreaching serves the conscientious anthropologist in her struggle to overcome overreaching theories of globalization. This highlights a point in Tsing that I found compelling: her schema (friction, engaged universals, traveling allegorical packages and gaps) locates the strategies of academics, forest-dwellers, metropolitan environmentalists and multinational corporations on a level playing field: both are mobilizing similar forms to different ends, with different effects. The environmentalists and corporations share the tactic of appealing to universals; both must engage universals in a variety of settings and scale-making projects. By overreaching, Tsing is able to sift through the commonalities and differences of cultural projects, whereas reductive theories of globalization overreach in order to find the same process happening everywhere. Metaphor, as a kind of overreaching, allows for the creation of engaged theoretical universals.

Metaphor is not only a concept of traveling but also a travling concept. The English definition of metapherein given in my apple widget dictionary, "to transfer," is itself etymologically related to metaphor: trans+ferre, from Latin, meaning "to bear across." Indeed, the English word "to bear," from Old English beran, is thought to share an Indo-European root with the Latin ferre, the Greek pherein & the Sanskrit bharati. Commonalities and divergences, cross-cultural exchanges, linguistic drift, the rise and fall of empires: all make possible the language of metaphor itself. Friction can be read as a metaphor, a kind of representation; but the language in which representation takes place is also a product of friction as Tsing describes it. This friction has little to do with representation as such—where something known is repeated, something seen is depicted—but instead brushes against the limits of knowledge, the limits of language, introducing new, productive sites.

Therefore, we cannot attempt to gain critical purchase on Tsing's text by merely criticizing or valorizing the metaphorical operations of her book, because Tsing's project is only partially about representation. The work is also about encounters that take place at the limits of representation, encounters that have little to do with the replication of the same that underlies the logic of representation. When I wrote above that "this term struck me," this phrase is and is not a metaphor—on the one hand, the term did not reach out from the page and slap me in the face and is thus a metaphor; on the other hand, "struck" demarcates the zone of an affective encounter with the text that takes place within a practice of reading, of attention and boredom.

"Our categories and discriminations always produce zones of 'boredom' and unreadability; powerful projects of categorization . . . produce persistently uninteresting, invisible, and sometimes illegitimate zones—which I call 'gaps'" (172). In some sense, Tsing's book is a project of categorization, and she produces some zones, such as the zone of friction as metaphor, the zone of the role of metaphor on her own argument, that receives little explicit attention in her text. Yet perhaps this gap does not merely point to a failure of sustained argument, or a failure of representation; instead, these gaps may be just as evocative for the space they create for an encounter with the text.

Perhaps metaphors are overreaching attempts to span these unintelligible gaps, and the difference between strategies of overreaching is their mode of reading encounters and the ways they set up new encounters. Much globalization theory sets up encounters with localities in order to illustrate a point, to provide a concrete representation or depiction. Against this mode of overreaching, Tsing overreaches with a metaphor of friction that emphasizes the encounter. An ethics of scholarship and action is thus not justified a priori by universal principles, but must attend to the productivity and contingency of the encounter.

Animating Archives Conference - In Response to Aaron's post

2009-12-06T18:10:00.000-08:00

In response to Aaron’s blog post concerning the Animating Archives conference, and in particular the presentation of Ramesh Srinivasan, I would like to contend with the statement that the Cambridge’s classification system was “simply inadequately capturing the full extent of the Zuni culture,” as Aaron blogged. It wasn’t so much that the archive’s the classification systems were not adequate in terms of its inability to capture the full cultural extent of the Zunis, but rather, as a more fundamental level, this system, and to a great extent, many archive systems rely on a certain logic based on ontologically-rigid structures.

In the case of the Zuni archive, it is not that the archive per se could really ever adequately define or represent the culture, but rather that the archive as a stable institution could be challenged by multiple and sometimes reverse discourses. As Srinivasan argued, this incommensurability between these two modes of knowledge production (the Zuni people and outside organizations), can facilitate a rethinking of the ontological base that the digital archive is based on.

What I found provocative in Srinivasan presentation was the relationship between the particular and the universal within the digital archive, more specifically the search engine. As Srinivasan argued, the algorithm of the search does not privilege the local, but rather depends on a metadata that disempowers those who are able to speak and give knowledge and how one can present that knowledge.

And although making this type of archive standard to every archive does not seem plausible or even necessary, the problematization of the top-down versus a possible bottom-up system that Srinivasan posits is productive in bringing up important questions concerning the ownership of knowledge and cultural production of indigenous or marginalized people groups whose cultural artifacts are placed and classified within an archive.

One point that Srinivasan made in his presentation and an area that I hope will get blog responses is the role of the narrative in the local. To Srinivasan, the local production of knowledge into the archive was based on the production of the narrative, an area that Srinivasan hoped would be applicable to other archives with similar goals. The narrative is privileged in the ethnographic look into the local and it would be interesting to put pressure on this apparent necessity.

Performative Universals

2009-12-06T14:16:00.000-08:00

Tsing's Friction gives us two very powerful tools for theorizing the global. Here, I am referring to "spectacular accumulation" and "universals." If I had to generalize, I'd say that universals, as Tsing sees them, are what enable these acts of spectacular accumulation. It is by eliding the differences between local and global, constructing some sort of generalizable model, a universal that investment capitalists can conjure profits. To illustrate this, I will turn to Tsing's reading of Bre-X and examine the universals at work within her explanation of spectacular accumulation.

At the heart of Tsing's discussion in the second chapter of her book is a conception of capital accumulation as a necessarily performative act.

Performance here is simultaneously economic performance and dramatic performance. The "economy of appearances" I describe depends on the relevance of this pun; the self-conscious making of a spectacle is a necessary aid to gathering investment funds.

What enables a company like Bre-X to gain so much steam and gather so much investment capital is the quality of the story they tell. With its dramatic twists and turns, its mysteries and its invocation of a new frontier for Canada, it managed to convince the Canadian public to invest. "In speculative enterprises, profit must be imagined before it can be extracted" (57).

Tsing's universals are also performative in nature. "What is most striking about these [. . .] features of generalization is the way they cover each other up" (89). Though "small details support great visions an the universal is discovered in particularities" and "tentative and contingent collaborations among disparate knowledge seekers and their disparate forms of knowledge can turn incompatible facts and observations into compatible ones" these two motions counteract each other. These disparate forms of knowledge and small details are superseded by the very universal vision. Similar to the way in which a drama must be told before capital accumulation can be accomplished, distinct bits of information must be fished out before they can be bridges with a universal.

When we shift our focus back to spectacular accumulation, we see the way the individual elements which make the story, the individual frictions between actors are covered up by the progression of the narrative and the very accumulation of capital. Consider Tsing's graph illustrating the sprouting up of Finance capital, Franchise cronyism and Frontier culture. They all surround Spectacular accumulation. But even Tsing understands that "This diagram is both serious and a joke" (59). Because she must cover up some truth, some history with her own narrative, she acknowledges this.

But there is more. The conjuring Tsing talks of, in and of itself is a sort of universalizing of the particular. Indonesia becomes a frontier of Canada through a universalizing of south asia into an extension of Canada. "How do he self-consciously glossy and exaggerated virtual worlds conjured by eager collectors of finance become shapers of radically different peoples and places?" Tsing asks (59). While Tsing focuses on seeing the various scales, she does so by acknowledging the very acting, the erasure of the real in all of this modeling which we concern ourselves with in theory. For Tsing, what is real is performance, and questions of culture and society are questions of where we insert ourselves within these models.

What makes Tsing's theory so strong, I believe, is the way in which it is self-aware. Though she discusses how surprised she was attending a conference where uncertainty was taken into such great account, she, at all times, works to make evident what is erased--the hidden genealogies of whatever she's analyzing.

Also, for my final project, I plan to write a paper on the war on drugs and the ways in which it is presented as both simultaneously a local issue (demand-side issues dealing with incarceration, drug education, drug treatment and our laws at home) and a global issue (international drug trafficking, drug cartels and farmers).

Something something Archives

2009-12-05T17:42:00.000-08:00

I did not attend all that much of the Animating Archives. I did, however, manage to catch two talks by Profs. Srinivasan and Kun from California. For those of you who attended different talks, they focused on the structures of archives and how they might differ in digital media from more traditional paper-based storage archives.

Prof. Srinivasan took issue with traditional museum-based archival structures that were set in certain ontological categories. The implication was that using rigid definitions separated certain narratives from the objects in display leading to pictures that... skewed things a little.

What was important in categorizing and archiving items was what was included in their descriptions and what wasn't. In Srinivisan's case, Zuni artifacts that bore Cambridge's systemic classification system was simply inadequately capturing the full extent of Zuni culture.

Unfortunately, all universal classification systems lose something in categorization. Srinivisan's attempt at creating a Zuni archive might work - but only in a specific Zuni-based or Zuni-oriented context. Incorporating stories within archives and adding their proper cultural context (the difference between "this is what my grandmother made" vs. "for digging, stick") might help bring proper context to analysis but how far can this system go? The Cambridge system Srinivisan made an example of was probably used as a nearly-universal means of archiving and categorizing a global scenario. Srinivisan's system - a highly illuminating one - might only be applicable to very specific archives.

Only a specialist archive could get away with something so specialized. Or of a structure of archiving that is so complex. This can only work with a very specific audience that comes to the archive with a very specialized narrative in place to understand, intuitively, the necessary search parameters to access such an archive effectively. Sadly, I can't really see the addition of narratives being all that useful outside of this context.

One thing that does come to mind that might be an interesting way of looking at collecting and sifting through large amounts of data comes from my days working with intelligence services. A project was launched quite some time ago by the Pentagon's farout research wing, DARPA, that hoped to make military intelligence more efficient and eliminate some of the drudgery of analysis work that required bums-on-seats to read through countless newswire reports and field agent postings. Given the rather fluid nature of intelligence gathering, it would be very hard and counterproductive to create an efficiency division of labor that would result in easy to parse reports. What one had was a mess of intelligence redundancy - too many words on the same thing, too little on another.

And so, those boffins at DARPA and their boffin-friends from friendly overseas DARPA-esque agencies got to work creating a super Wiki. Now, I say super-wiki because what is a great big mess of intelligence reports but a collection of user-generated content that is structured with the most tenuous of categorical links? It was hoped that a brilliant new program would cut through all of that.

The new program would read the text of every report, identifying key terms like names, places, and dates, and plot them with specific phrases, generating a meta-report that identified the general premise of a subject and gave a brief summary of the entire network's data. Let's say the network has been working on "Brown University". It might pull up a set time frame's reports on the University and might link a few pertinent names and places and dates - so, for example, Aaron Wee might be linked to Wilson Hall several times over the Fall/Winter period of 2009. The report might also mention Aaron Wee was seen transferring large amounts of money to unknown sources, suspected to be Rhode Island secessionists. An intelligence analyst might get interested in this and call it a day, sending a CIA deathsquad to send Aaron Wee on an extraordinary trip. Or, seeing that Aaron Wee is not himself who she's after might choose to reorganize the search around Rhode Island Secessionists, drawing a new map where Aaron Wee is tenuously connected but might have links to a whole host of other RI rebels. Or she might pick the transfer of cash as a new search paramter and have the engine draw a new map based on that. Categories that, in of themselves, offer not much help find new meaning if they are reconfigured differently to provide new linkages. The same principle sort of works for the real Wikipedia too - who hasn't got caught lost on the internet, randomly hyperlinking from wiki page to wiki page in a mad mad tour of the world. Categories, despite not carrying narratives in of themselves, still ride on the internal narrative of the searcher. It is in how one views the world that categories are created - archival categories sometimes just make those easier to spot.

Having discrete categories does help in searches. Having them broad does stifle perceptions. But if categories are linked well and then re-fashioned to identify new patterns, they aren't so bad after all.

- A

The Proposal

2009-12-05T09:03:00.000-08:00

Those unfortunate enough to know me will no doubt realize that I am a big fan of pop culture in all its iterations - hence my endless YouTubing, my musings on pop culture outlets, and my hidden references to various undercurrent trends. So, after some restructuring of my final topic, I have settled on a widely known pop cultural phenomenon - Las Vegas.

Baudrillard and Umberto Eco have written several well-received articles/books on the Las Vegas phenomenon, aptly applying the term "hyperreal" to Vegas' absurd mixture of images and the saturation of a uniquely-Vegas persona - the hedonistic, 24/7 wonderland of indulgence. I take a similar view but I take off from a different point - "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas."

What does the saying (a relatively new phrase adopted from a much older vaudevillian tradition - or so they say) mean to the individual's cognitive mapping of the Vegas theme? How does a separation of reality connoted within "stays in Vegas" contribute to the parole of the Vegas experience? How do perceptions of the Vegas reality mesh with our pop cultural identifications of Vegas? And why might this saying be already out of place?

I'll be looking extensively at Jameson, de Certeau, and Terranova, while making asides with excerpts and ideas from Paglen. I'm hoping to look at geographies of the mind and place - and their relationships within a networked individual. It's going to be a jazzy time.

---

Also, something I found: http://gizmodo.com/5418342/ridiculous-user-interfaces-in-film-and-the-man-who-designs-them

Ever wondered who creates those needlessly complicated yet hauntingly pretty user-interfaces for Hollywood-blockbuster computer systems? They may look all futuristic and Wow but have no practical utility in real life - clunky, complicated, and non-intuitive, and probably as unfriendly with other systems as Macs. It's an interesting thing to ponder about how one grasps information technology - is society really still so technologically-blind that Hollywood has to produce images that have no bearing on current tech trends and instead chooses to dazzle the public with fancy-gee-whiz sorts? What does it say about Hollywood's perception of our access to information given that a UI is an access to information?

*I've done some low-level intelligence stuff before... The films that are ostensibly set in the current day with modern equipment featured in the video - Bourne, MI:3, Smith - does not represent reality. We use(d) Windows and Linux just like everyone else.

Red Balloon Challenge

2009-12-04T23:09:00.000-08:00

DARPA studies information flows through social media!

The Red Balloon Challenge:

"About the DARPA Network Challenge

To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA has announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems.

The challenge is to be the first to submit the locations of 10 moored, 8-foot, red, weather balloons at 10 fixed locations in the continental United States. The balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roads."

Friction

2009-12-03T18:58:00.000-08:00

Tsing’s critique of the body of theories surrounding globalization is based on the claim that the totalizing scope of these theories remain insufficient in understanding the complexities and differences that these exchanges and interactions produce and are produced by. However, it would seem that Tsing's argument also proves to be insufficient, failing to actively engage with the theories that she criticizes, merely deeming them wrong instead of expanding on why she believes that. I found Tsing's criticism to be weak due to the lack of rigor in her arguments. For example, in the coinage of spectacular accumulation, Tsing hopes to argue against notions of an evolutionary political economy, citing such theorists as David Harvey relying on teleological assumptions:

“According to regulation theorists, “flexible accumulation” is the latest stage of capitalism. Flexible accumulation follows Fordist production as barbarism follow savagery, that is, up a singular political-economic ladder” (75).

Although it could be argued whether or theorists like Harvey have such a deterministic take on global capitalism and the social relations of power within such a system, Tsing takes this as means for dismissing Harvey’s claims. It would almost seem that she is throwing the baby out with the bath water.

So while Tsing does not find Harvey’s analysis adequate in terms of its failure to leave room open for possibility or for having a causality that she finds, it would seem that her ideas of globalization are equally as problematic.

And although it is the problematic of the relation between the particular and the universal that Tsing sees as exactly that which makes her conception of friction revolutionary or aligned with conditions of potentiality, it would seem that any other understanding or conceptualization of globalization that does not come from her experience with global flows is wrong. The use of ethnographic writing, while provocative in its challenges that it brings to ‘dominant’ cultural theorists or theorists who discuss globalization, fails to actively engage with the theorists she is critiquing or the theories that she seems to find ‘universalizing’ or ‘totalizing’. Theory, as Tsing argues, “has addressed itself more to replication and planned development than to unexpected opportunities and injuries that must be addressed, however inadequately” (266). The very charge that she seems to give the body of theories that she is critiquing is something that I find in her work as well – inadequate. Inadequate in terms of addressing and fleshing out her argument on engaging universals and the somewhat asymmetrical power relation at work in the different scales that Tsing outlines but that which she points to and shines in a positive and rather hopeful light. That is not to say that I would have preferred her text to maintain a dystopic look at the condition and friction of global connectedness, but rather, that there was more engagement with the very friction that Tsing comes up against in her own theory when in dialogue with other theory.

The way in which Tsing critiques dominant theories of globalization and her proposal of a rethinking of global connectedness, while offers something different and seemingly complex, nevertheless relies on a narrative. As she conceptualizes the complexity of the friction between actors, scales and flows, it seems that her choice to handle this conceptualization in the form of the narrative raises questions. What is at stake in the use of narrative for Tsing’s project? And what assumptions does Tsing’s project rely on?

The Frontier and the People without Culture

2009-12-03T09:35:00.001-08:00

I was also very intrigued by Tsing's discussion of the Frontier, especially when she focuses on the penyingsos, who she describes as "so human, yet so transiently identified" (p. 35). In her discussion of them she uses them to challenge the idea of culture in an interesting way, saying that they had no "ordinary culture" (p. 35). At the same time, these people are dangerous. The questions that arose for me is why?
There seem to be two things at work here. One is the physical frontier where everything goes and there is no law. This is the same thing at work in movies about the Wild West or even Orientalist travel literature. These are places where danger lurks around every corner, where there is no order and where nature still dominates in one way or another. This is an interesting way to think about the allegorical package of the frontier being transported and moved in other parts of the world and it shows us that the frontier is not a static progression, but rather creates ones of intense flux and interaction. But there is something else, a point about culture, since there is immense danger coming from these thiefs who have "names but no houses, families, work schedule, or ordinary time" (p.53). They are "without ordinary culture" (p. 35).
In this way, these chainsaw men are similar to the diseases that we have discussed. They move around without being tied down, taking what they need and leaving when they have exhausted the area. This is interesting, since the rest of her books emphasizes networks, communities and personal ties and the connection between people outside of culture and people within networks is an interesting one to pursue further. It challenges in this way not only culture, but also networks. I really liked the book, because there were many such moments when the author offers other ways to think about concepts we take for granted.

Leper Colony, Community of Disease -- Nic Mooney

2009-12-03T09:25:00.000-08:00

As established in Contagious, there is something uniquely disturbing about the insidious spread of infection: close contact, societal bonds, friendship, and love are marked with danger, and these methods that otherwise heal must be shunned instead: prized contact with other people is a hazard. We've all experienced this in little ways: i.e., when you have a cough, and your friends don't want to get too close. But a permanent disease is another monster: if illness as minor and temporary as a cold can cause loneliness, one that persists can utterly transform. Diagnosis of an STD changes your sex and love lives forever, in terms of who you choose to interact with and who will interact with you.
This is also reflected in the treatment of Cedar Creek in Outbreak: it is permanently tainted, and thus becomes the Other, the friend you shun, the potential partner you refuse, or for the antagonists, the human beings you bomb. It is only in the discovering of the antidote that the people of Cedar Creek become humans again. We get our happy ending, but what if there was no conspiracy or antidote? Would Dustin Hoffman have wanted to intervene? The people of Cedar Creek would still reside in the Other territory -- only their health can redeem them.
In thinking of parallels, I was drawn to the fascinating history of leper colonies. Isolated on islands with no contact with the uninfected except perhaps a few religious caretakers, a community of disease is forced upon them. Unlike Cedar Creek, death was not inevitable, but their lingering infection marked them as a threat. If the only people you ever have contact with all have leprosy, do those without it still exist? And does the condition still exist? I believe their status as infected lingers on most poignantly in the lives they used to have: a time before infection, a time of mobility, a time of many people...these are not sensations that are easily erased. When I discovered I might have an STD, it's as if my life split in two...the careless time before and the utterly foreign, utterly terrifying time after. When it turned out I didn't, the chasm vanished and my life was one again, though perhaps the terror lingers on in a tiny way -- the horrible sensation of knowing what it might be like to be the Other, if only for a day.

FROM A GAP TO A SEAL: THE ORIGIN OF THE CONTEMPORARY CONDOM

2009-12-03T04:45:00.000-08:00

Jordan Carter

Now all is changed great peace and quiet

The sharp-edged sword becomes the tapper’s knife.

The carved shield becomes a swing

Wherein is wrapped in clothes the babe whose future

Lies

In the price of rubber tapped in a ring.

(Anonymous, 1925)

This colonial poem addresses an obscure yet monumental history that is infused within the essential component of the modern day condom: latex. Indeed, as Michael Doug suggests in his 1994 article, published in Economic and Political Weekly, "Transition from Native Forest Rubbers to Hevea brasiliensis among Tribal Smallholders in Borneo,” in colonial South East Asia (primarily Malaysia and Indonesia), the transition from nomadic rubber collection to sedentary latex cultivation via the planting and tapping of the Hevea brasiliensis (the source of the latex used in the production of the modern day condom) represented a rise from inter-tribal warfare and the formation of tribal states more actively involved in world-trade (Dove, 392).

Prior to the sedentary cultivation of Heavea brasiliensis, forest products including other various natural-occurring rubbers comprised substantial portions of the economies of the Malay and Iban peoples of Southeast Asia between the mid-18^th century and the early 20^th century (Dove, 384). Tribes within Borneo and the Malay Peninsula were engaged in constant travel—giving primacy to areas with high density in latex-filled trees such as the indigenous gutta percha (Dove, 386). This nomadic lifestyle perpetuated tribal discordance via continuous territorial warfare and tribal displacement (Dove, 392).

Moreover, by felling the rubber trees in an expedient yet destructive slash-and-tap method of rubber collection, the Iban people elicited the conservationist-initiatives of the Dutch (Dove, 386):

Colonial Observation:

The native found a gutta tree, about ten inches in diameter, and after cutting it

down, he ringed it neatly all the way along the stem, at intervals of a yard of less.

underneath each ring he put a calabash to catch the milk-white sap which slowly

exuded (Hornaday, 18885:433).

Colonial Response:

[The natives] have not yet graduated in the science of forest conservation. Instead

of making incisions at regular intervals in the bark of a tree, and extracting a portion of the juice at different periods, by which its further growth would not be prevented, they usually adopt the radical expedient of cutting the whole tree down

(Bock, 18881:204).

Although the extermination of rubber resources was a looming possibility, mercantilist incentive surely skews the basis of Dutch intervention (Dove, 387). The misconception of the Dutch in this cacophonous moment of contact with the ‘Other,’ the non-persons who inhabit the “empty” and “wild” grey area of the forest (Tsing). Accordingly, Dutch colonial governments restricted tapping-rights, requiring a license to tap the trees. Such enactments were sanctioned in the name of conservation yet they were clearly tainted by capitalist self-interest. Indeed, they allowed for the Dutch to monitor and impede the exploitation of this natural resource by local smallholders who had benefited from its cultivation for centuries (Dove, 387). Conceptually, the entire colonial market structure is set up in a manner that forces the indigenous people to exploit their natural resources, in this case natural rubbers, in order to meet the demand of commercial booms such as the ‘latex boom’ of the early 20^th century (Dove, 387). However, once the indigenous people comply in-line with economic pressures and exploit their resources, they become susceptible to colonial mandates that implement unwarranted restrictions on their native land. But is this “collaboration” between forest dwellers and Western merchants negative or positive, cooperative, or compromising? According to Tsing, it is both. In the immediacy of intervention, the Iban people felt the burn of friction through foreign restrictions on ‘natural’ property; however, the subsequent fire cleared a new path for the indigenous people that would have otherwise remained out of sight.

Indeed, although the Dutch implemented novel mandates, they allowed for the unlimited tapping of independently planted rubber trees (Dove, 391). As such, the Iban fell into a new niche – the planting and cultivation of Hevea brasiliensis. This new agricultural emphasis allowed for a transition to a more sedentary tribal state lifestyle, which somewhat involuntarily launched Borneo and Malaysia alike into the world market.

Nomadic rubber collection preceded the cultivation of Hevea brasiliensis. The primary concerns of this emphasis were of the “physical” nature whereas those of the latter were in regards to “fiscal” dangers (Dove, 391). Indeed, during the era of rubber collection, adult men from various tribes would go on gathering expeditions ready for warfare on the instance of crossing paths with a rival clan. As the natives incorporated this “physical” method into lore and idolatry, however, a certain sense of certainty and tradition was imbued in it. This is reflected in the “remarkable ¾ meter-high rubber statue representing a rhinoceros with a man on its back.” As the rhinoceros symbolized the “hazards of travel” in uncharted Borneo, the statue was offered to “the spirits in return for a successful rubber-gathering expedition” (Dove, 388).

Conversely, the “fiscal” oriented nature of the more modern plant/tap method was a response to colonial pressures and thus without cultural roots. It’s origin lies in the friction’s manifestation of dreams, of new national identities and imagined global commerce. But the air of change does not pass without ruffling a few feathers and thus many indigenous people did not feel comfortable relying so heavily “on factors over which they have no control” as “market prices for rubber are volatile and represent the greatest source of uncertainty in rubber cultivation” (Dove, 391). Uncertainty aside, the “tribesmen” responded to “broader political-economic structures exerting increasing control over commodity production” by introducing Hevea brasiliensis and subsequently capitalizing on the weak points of the global market and colonial rule (Dove, 393).

GAGA AND THE CONTAGIOUS

2009-12-03T04:40:00.000-08:00

Jordan Carter

“The healthy human being turned pathogen” is branded. Indeed, this transition—the heart of Wald’s discourse in Contagious—leaves a mark. While the ‘contagion’ may be global, the response is national, and on the micro-scale, individual carriers wear the scarlet letter of the stigmatized pathogen. Indeed, the disease and its spawn are not popular; they catalyze a response grounded in negativity and difference, identity formation and destruction. They healthy, or non-diseased, fear and isolate themselves from the ‘primitive’ source: signs that connote decay, poverty, and ailment are avoided like walking taboo. The diseased become the ‘Other’ irrespective of national borders.

But in this cosmopolitan postmodern playground of appropriation and pastiche described by Fredric Jameson, is the concept of ‘disease’ purely stigma, or has the subject’s surface-oriented behavior commercialized the rapport between the healthy and the infected? Is there now room for some sort of commoditization of disease? An integration of the contagious into pop culture? Are people just as excited by the prospect of disease as they are horrified? Lady Gaga’s latest music video, “Bad Romance,” suggests there is no separating the ‘sexy’ from the ‘stigmatized’—everything is surface and everything is consumable. In the ‘material’ world, the ugly is the beautiful, and the disease carries the potential to be the cure. As Gaga’s first verse announces: “I want your ugly, I want your diseased, I want your everything, as long as it’s free.” Regardless of whether you’re disease ridden or the spitting image of healthy, the universal commonality of consumption remains. The stigmatized may be deemed ‘unnatural,’ but as Jameson notes, “Nature has been eclipsed” by the image and the commodity. Consumption is culture, and culture is the new nature.

Gaps: Between Nature and Nurture

2009-12-02T18:33:00.000-08:00

Tsing's discussion of the productivity of gaps reminded me of the classic debate about the origin of physical and behavioral traits: nature vs. nurture. In some ways, this rigid dichotomy is a translation of Tsing's idea of nature vs. society in the destruction of rainforests--something must fall within the asocial, biological, almost primeval space of the forest, or within the realm of society and its assault on the natural. Tsing describes the social-natural spaces in which human communities live within forests: the productive "gap" that cannot be captured by essentialist and antithetical notions of "social" and "natural." However, I think Tsing notion of the productivity of gaps also applies to the tension between "natural" or biological and social forces as they are played out not in forests, but in the human body. When psychologists and human biologists try to pinpoint the sources of the human difference, they generally phrase the influences as nature (genetics), nurture (environment), or some combination of the two. The space in between these two categories, however, rarely enters the discourses of science and pop culture. In fact, the gap between genetics and environmental influences is a hugely productive space, one that is only starting to be studied by scientists but may be crucial to our formation as individuals. This is the study of epigenetics--of nongenetic factors that affect phenotype, or how our genes are expressed. The epigenome can contain changes that are spurred by our environments that do not change our underlying DNA sequence, but nonetheless affect the expression of our genetic material. Further, these changes can last an entire lifetime, and can be passed to successive generations. This field begins to explain such phenomena as how identical twins raised in the same environment may develop drastically different personalities. However, although epigenetics offers an example of a productive gap, the fact that it has become a term in itself, and is a field of growing popularity, raises the question again: what is being left out? What new gap has formed with the creation of this new field of study, and what are the productive possibilities of this gap?

Two of Everything

2009-12-01T22:19:00.000-08:00

Looking back, I have wanted to make connections between the outbreak narrative and the Tsing reading on “Friction”.

Wald bangs into our heads the idea that disease travels in a way that betrays globalization, xenophobia, and nativism. The paths of pathogens show us how we traverse boundaries and interact outside of our own sphere.

The stranger narrative in “Contagious” brought to mind the idea of friction. When a newcomer breaks imagined or created barriers, what is carried with them? Either with or without cognizance? Wald writes, “Travelers indeed introduce new microbes into a community. A population that is too self-enclosed suffers from inbreeding and is therefore more susceptible to outbreaks (and stagnation) with serious consequences for the population… strangers are ‘generators of diversity’; they help promote human genetic variation, which is beneficial to the survival of the population” (p. 56). The symbol of a stranger or visitor exemplifies the idea of friction. Tsing defines a form of friction as the attempt to create a global connection. This relationship is only facilitated by direct overtures. Stepping beyond boundaries creates cross-cultural and cross-geographic relationships. This constructs a global community or village that is defined by diversity and is inclusive of other-ness: “But strangers are also essential to the health and growth of a community, both culturally and biologically” (p. 56). How does the outbreak narrative fit into the desire for healthy and capitalistically-advantageous cross-discourse?

Can the two battles be maintained or balanced? Is there nationalism in the fractured as Tsing supposes? These are the major questions of the course—which does not make them unanswerable but all the more intriguing. In the literal sense, disease is imaginary. We do not perceive germs: their travel or destination. In that fear, we construct a Typhoid Mary. Not every stranger carries a virus (or, does every stranger carry a type of virus—it just matters if it has the power to inflict who it comes in contact with?). So there is the constructed “enemy” within every stranger. Both the bacteria and possible intent is, in fact, camouflaged or imagined. Maybe there is an inherent dichotomy in cross-boundary manipulation. With two boundaries, there will always be two sides and thus, two answers, two manifestations, and two angles.

-Nick White

Theory/theatre

2009-12-01T20:43:00.000-08:00

Lauren Neal
Priscilla Wald lecture (late)

The English word “theory” comes from the Greek “theoria,” meaning contemplation, speculation, or sight. It is related to the word “theatron,” or place for viewing – the theater. Theater and theory are kin.

I found Priscilla Wald's lecture remarkable and compelling, particularly her insistence that any theory is itself a story, a narrative, a way in which we 'tell ourselves to ourselves' in the Clifford Geertz-ian ("Interpretation of Cultures") sense. She argued that we must take into account the deliberate production of narratives (discourse?) and asked if we should take them seriously as a form of power and activism. Wald affirmed that exclusion from history renders one's life meaningless, as one is stripped of the opportunity and promise of the Self into the future. Notions of visibility strike me as particularly critical to this argument. Here I point to the above definitions of theory and theatre, which derive etymologically from the same root, emphasizing a mode of vision, thought, or seeing. Is this not another way of citing 'narrativity,' or the modalities by which we tell our stories and represent ourselves, our histories, etc.?

1. Race as Performative Repetition
In "Race as a Kind of Speech Act," Louis Miron and Jonathan Inda argue that "race does not refer to a pre-given subject. Rather, it works performatively to constitute the subject itself and only acquires a naturalized effect through repeated or reiterative naming of or reference to that subject." (7) The norms that constitute the symbolic order and create "the grid of intelligibility" are produced and circulated by the relations of power existing within a given society. In a white supremacist society, for example, norms work by constructing a binary opposition between white and black (or nonwhite) in which white is always privileged over black. (8) Subjects are thus interpellated into the symbolic order as gendered and raced beings and are recognizable only in reference to the existing grid of intelligibility. For Miron and Inda, the interpellation "Look, a Negro," famously addressed by Frantz Fanon, is parallel to "It's a girl!" (9) And once interpellated, subjects must, in turn, incessantly cite and mime the very race norms that created their intelligibility (and thus their condition of possibility) in the first place. In short, according to Miron and Inda, race performativity is the power of discourse to bring about what it names through the citing or repetition of racial norms.

Thinking of the narrative relative to this quote, I find it critical to reiterate the final point: "race performativity is the power of discourse to bring about what it names through the citing or repetition of racial norms." In other words, the way in which we narrate our statuses, positionality, and histories may itself incite racialization. In essence, we take the raw data of human existence and from it derive algorithms which we then apply to our understanding of the world and its operative functions. Really, we should be paying closer attention to the production of such algorithms (theories, discourses, modes of 'seeing') because they are what eventually labor to reproduce the raw data associated with certain conditions of living. This eerily invokes the notion of cells and their relation to a donor: what happens to basic human operatives (cells, or, 'actual' conditions of living) once removed from their source, processed, reproduced, and passed along to others? Are they now stripped of their particularities?

Is the human stripped of the particularities of his/her experience once integrated into a global/communal environment? (or, rather, once we acknowledge the situating of an 'individual' in a 'communal' context)

What is an individual's relationship not only to the multiplicitous, global experience outside oneself, but also one's relationship to the multiplicity of cells inside oneself? Each cell is individual, promoting biological diversity, but the singular is integral to the creation of a 'mass' or a 'whole.'

***

There are various "allegorical readings [which] let us see how the assignment of particular narrative functions to black characters can imply that the African presence in American social and political life, while serviceable, is expendable" (from "Look, A Negro!" by Robert Gooding-Williams). Racialized persons serve as decoration in a variety of famous tales (i.e. films like "Casablanca" of "Ghost"): utile but flat, void of their own narrative or platform for sharing their own multifaceted stories.

The social, especially in the United States and other places haunted by slavery and colonization, interpellates racialized persons into positions of voicelessness; while, conversely, biology creates hyperinvisible subjects of these persons by rendering their particular, multivalent experiences concurrent with any nonspecific narrative.

***

I was also moved by Wald's notion of 'bioslavery' - or, the 'spectre of enslavement' haunting a present-day commodification of organic/corporeal material, and when that becomes the commodification of humanity or personhood. I think it's intriguing to consider the fact that the African-American experience of slavery included sexual relationships with white slaveowners: white genes are present in a large majority of African Americans, whether acknowledged or not. When conditions of slavery have been and/or are reproduced in 'peculiar institutions' (think: Loic Wacant) like Jim Crow, the urban ghetto, American sports, the American prison, they are oft ignored. The history of miscegenation is pushed even further under the bookshelves. The idea of a black woman's cells being disseminated across the globe is fascinating in contrast to a predominantly white, imperialistic spread of ideological (and biological) seed throughout history.

When will we tell that story in a new way, so we can understand why it is that the telling of, say, HeLa cells is so disturbing?

Mapping the Travel Guide

2009-12-01T20:13:00.000-08:00

(Final Proposal)

How do westernized travel guides, and the point-of-interest maps that they contain, change the way travelers experience places and the paths created between them? Do these recommended destinations, or points-of-interest, overshadow the experience of reaching them and thus promote passive/detached travel?

In exploring these questions and a few others, I plan on tapping into a few different texts. I will draw from de Certeau in analyzing the difference between places and spaces, consequently inspecting the implications of point-of-interest maps and how they specifically shape the representation of places and valorize destinations over paths. Point-of-interest maps in travel guides tend to greatly simplify geographical areas in order to show large, obtrusive icons of POIs creating a representation much like that of a connect-the-dots book for children. Travelers are encouraged, through the graphic presentation of a list of "must-see places", to find the fastest route between the destinations and are given very few alternate possibilities for maneuvering the space. With simplified maps that present a collapse of the heterogeneity of places (through graphic representation they become all the same), POI maps "colonize space", in the words of Lisa Parks, and become capitalist satellites, reaching their tentacles into the foreign world. POIs become branded recommendations of the travel guide corporations that commodify previously undiscovered, local destinations and create "tourist traps", the ugly product of capitalist expansion. As destinations change as a result of the constant flow of tourists, the travel guide moves on in constant search of the latest and greatest (discarding those places that no longer meet rating standards to let them be devoured by the scars left behind by capitalism). Some destinations adapt to meet rating systems, becoming new westernized capitalist outposts that provide a safe haven for those tourists that wish to see new geographical areas without activating the attached cultural space. Here, I will explore Robbins in his concept of travel/cosmopolitanism as detachment. Not only do the effects of the commodification of the tourist destination show detachment, but also POI maps present a complete detachment from cultural space, consolidating cultural monuments of massive historical significance into a series of icons and branded destinations. The user may select the path to viewing these destinations, but because they are presented with the serious limitations of simplified representation, the user inevitably follows a recommended path (if only following the travel guide). Therefore, in order to experience new paths, the traveler must reject the travel guide completely, or supplement it with other maps. In this way, travel guides valorize their branded, recommended destinations over the paths that lead to them, presenting a hierarchy of places over spaces. Because space requires actualization, travel guides (when utilized exclusively) promote passive travel and detachment from culture (although they try to mask this by presenting a concise cultural summary as an introduction to the book).

I also plan on drawing from: Tsing, Anderson, and various travel guides (past and present)

Late thoughts on Disease

2009-12-01T08:42:00.001-08:00

I apologize if this is slightly off topic, since this is posted after the week we had these discussions in, but I still had some thoughts about Outbreak and Contagious. I really liked the book and how it showed how our society in general was and is shaped and influenced by outbreak narratives and think this way to go about looking at culture, especially with the technological changes confronting us now. The topic that I came away thinking about, though, was how disease interacts with space and time to create networks between the sick, or rather, how and why it doesn't. This is distinct from the narratives and myths that she talks about, since it focuses on the individual's experience of disease and the change in his or her perception of personhood that this might entail. If we look at the swine flu, since this is the example closest to me right now, we can see that there is a global response and that the media is treating just as Wald would expect it to. This shows that any infection that can spread rapidly, seems to be interpreted equally. It is scary and a threat, regardless of how severe the symptoms are or what the mortality rate is. There is something universal in the response, which we can see if we remember the pictures of people at airports wearing masks we could see during the SARS crisis.
However, if we look at the infected individual, we see that the swine flu is obviously totally different from SARS, typhoid or AIDS. The treatment is nothing more than rest and insolation and the duration is only a few days. The main thing we have to fear is that it makes us unable to work and interact with people face to face for a short time. The fact that the response is so similar and the diseases are so different is proof of Wald's point, but led me to ask questions about the individual's experience. We have read about the global response, which is universal in nature. We will all suffer from it, we are all in danger and we need to all protect ourselves. This leaves no room for the individual, except as a super spreader, which again is an individual that threatens us all. We see this in the movie Outbreak. The people need to be quarantined to build any sort of community. The escape attempt that ends with a jeep getting shot at is only a possible response due to the spatial constraints put on the people. The disease and the experience of being close to people with the disease did not in any way connect them, the quarantine did. Some might argue that this is also due to the fact that the disease has a 100% mortality rate, but I think even if there were survivors, we could not envision them forming any sort of community based on their shared ideal, except if it is rooted in a shared space, such as a hospital or a quarantined town. Diseases are somehow not an experience that can connect individuals except in a healthy group that fears it. This is very different from other experiences, which can connect disparate people, be they ex-military personnel, fans of a movie preparing for a new release or even shoppers preparing for black friday. This also has a temporal aspect, since diseases pass quickly, whereas other experiences don't, but the military is also only has a relatively short duration. The question I thought about is why the survivors of a disease seem to want to move past it as quickly as possible and return to the lives they led before, totally erasing all memories of the disease. This seems to be explained through stigmatization or perhaps isolation during the treatment, but with new technologies, we are never truly isolated and stigmatization would seem to somewhat prohibit the reentry into society if it was indeed strong enough. I think it would be interesting to do some sort of ethnography centered around some individuals being treated for a disease to explore this further and to move from the response to the individual experience and look at how the two interact. We see in Tsing's book, how varied and useful ethnographies can be is we allow them to branch out. Something like that would be helpful in exploring the interesting question of how diseases are actually experienced.

Metaphorical Knowledge

2009-12-01T08:26:00.000-08:00

Friction's hypothesis is, at its core, a metaphor. The discussion of culture as rubbing, producing heat, and so melting, exploding, etc. is the central thesis, a critical derivation of the idea of "culture clash." To be sure, Tsing can back up each claim she makes with non-metaphorical knowledge, but this misses the point in my view. What's important to me is the ability to produce meaning at the metaphorical level. Tsing is especially interesting in this regard because she does not merely offer us a fresh metaphor; rather, she takes an initial metaphor ("clash") and, accepting its consituent parts (ie culture as physical and as touching) reframes the outcome (as "friction")-- working in a metaphor for culture, changing it-- and thus changing the nature of culture, as if this analysis of the terms of the metaphor were somehow an analysis of culture itself, that the constituitive logic of the metaphor were something which reflected (rather than pinpointed or exceeded) the substance of its subject.

I am intrigued by the ease with which metaphor is used as a tool for knowledge, and how manipulating it is often considered a sufficient examination of that which it takes as its subject.

This Blog Post is Both Serious and a Joke

2009-12-01T00:43:00.000-08:00

A minor subtheme that has cropped up over and over in the readings this semester for me has been many authors' willingness to go for the easy pun. I fully understand the value of acknowledging polysemy, and I have nothing against exploring its possibilities on their own merits even where the actual connection of the symbols thus conjured to the source material is highly debatable. I start feeling dubious about an author's intellectual honesty - and, honestly, capacity - when they start implying that purely accidental (as in, not etymologically or anything but orthographically related) linguistic co-conjurings are somehow illuminating. They typically pull this implication off in a particular style that seems to be fairly widely accepted, in which they point out the connection in a knowing manner, but don't actually analyze it, and it is 'left unsaid' for the savvy reader to nod knowingly at. But sometimes what's left unsaid is truly unsayable, as for instance in the most atrocious example we have encountered, in the article about cell phone usage in the Philippines, where the fact that digits (numerals) are manipulated by digits (fingers) on digital (binary) devices was presented as meaningful. Guh.

Tsing's flirtation with joking, in her 'both serious and a joke' diagrams and acronyms, is not immediately so outrageous, but it is suspect. One theory is that the joking half of these bits of content are really just there to enliven the book and keep the reader happy. This would be a very sloppy (and unnecessary; the book is very entertaining as is) move and seems very unlikely. A more likely possibility is that she believes that the half-seriousness of her models in some way models a half-seriousness endemic to that which they represent. This is in line with her points about the drama of capital, and the economy of appearances. But how effective are these diagrams in drawing the reader's attention to the real-life absurdities they mirror? Do they simply distract and detract from what claims to rigor the book can make?

friction

2009-12-01T00:05:00.000-08:00

Tsing's elaboration on 'Frontier' was very helpful in forming her critique of late capitalism based on post-colonial logic.

That the narrative developed by capitalism, to be successful, "require[d] de Guzman [to] wander alone on an empty landscape, (66)" shows any space, real or imaginary, is suspect to commoditification. This newly discovered threat is worked out by means analyzing 'frontier-ness'; Tsing describes a frontier as an "imaginative project," rather than an actual place, this project is one fundamentally paradoxical, as the frontier brings with it notion of known and unknown, legitimate and taboo (33). Furthermore, being a "space of desire" for vastly different communities, individuals and financial institutions makes a frontier a perfect place for Tsing's multifaceted concept of friction, with its polysemic origins and results. Is this frontier, which creates its own demands through binary opposites (explorable-off limits etc.) a requirement for friction?

Friction

2009-11-30T22:26:00.000-08:00

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's Friction starts with a critique of postcolonial theory and its failure to examine the "universal", a concept that is also constructed by the colonial encounter. I am still trying to fully understand Tsing's concept of the universal. She identifies 3 universals that comprise the sections of her book - prosperity, knowledge and freedom. The universals she has chosen originate from the Englightenment, and her discussion of universalist expansion originates with the beginning of colonialism. She writes that "the universal offers us the chance to participate in the global stream of humanity", which seems to imply that it was the colonial encounter, whereby the West met the Rest, that enabled us to think in universal terms (1). The phrase "global connections" is predicated upon the understanding of what is truly "global" and it was only when the globe was properly mapped and the limits of the earth were established, that we were able to think about universals. As such, the universal, while all-encompassing, is also an inherently limited term. Tsing critiques postcolonial thinkers (and especially anthropologists) for focusing too much on the particulars, thus ignoring the power of the universal as concepts travel from the West to the Rest. At the same time, very much in the tradition of postcolonialism, Tsing frames the West as being the perpetrator of universals. Universal aspirations are seen to travel from the West to the Rest, rather than the other way around. What does this imply about the flow of global connections? What does this mean for the agency of the Rest / the Other / the Third World (or however we may term the non-West)? Is the only way they can move forward by creating friction between themselves and the universal? Drawing upon the scientific concept of friction that allows for movement on earth, Tsing locates friction at the junctures between the global and the local (the glocal!) In this, I was strongly reminded of James Scott's Weapons of the Weak, the classic ethnography about small-scale resistance. How is friction different from resistance? Tsing implies that friction is a more productive process - friction allows for the adaptation of the universal to local contexts, just as the Meratus do when they adopt the stories of environmental leaders elsewhere. The global potential of friction then, is its ability to co-opt the universal for specific means, and then through global connections, propel this instance into the global discourse. Friction enables movement, but friction also has the ability to stop movement. Is friction always productive, or can it be destructive as well?

Are universals universal?

2009-11-30T17:26:00.000-08:00

In Friction, Anna Tsing introduces a series of elements that she claims hold much influence over the transformation of globalization in a modern society defined by its tangled web of global connections. Developing her analysis around the deforestation of the Indonesian rainforest in the 90s, Tsing introduces friction as her main point of interest. Tsing splits global study into universals and particulars (while emphasizing difference in each) and strives towards making their intersection point more productive (it is this collision of differing ideas, without a unifying theoretical force, that Tsing claims makes popular globalization theory unproductive). She finds this unifying force in what she calls friction. Friction seems to be a somewhat invisible force that drives interactions towards the productive, while simultaneously getting in the way of their smooth operation. It is because of this presence of friction that Tsing claims that capitalism can be overcome (while others, who fail to recognize the productiveness of friction, view capitalism as an all-encompassing, unbeatable globalizing machine). In her discussion of friction, Tsing emphasizes the importance of interaction in "defining movement, cultural form, and agency." She seems to attribute cultural form not to the supposedly unique identity of a country or cultural area but rather to the combined effect of multiple "particulars" and "universals". The multiplicity of particulars comes from within a country or from distant nations through interaction (such as Indonesia's interaction with Japan in the adoption of the sogo shosha trading method) and leaves distinct markings on a culture. Universals, however, seem much more complex. I have not gained a full grasp of the concept, but it is almost as though universals can function as tools that only work properly within a particular historical context (a limit that Tsing claims many cannot see when discussing their knowledge of the universal), pushing towards liberation from an oppressive force. The universal is also an aspiration/achievement that moves across distances and cultures and gains power and effectiveness through its encounters with friction via movement through (interaction with) localities and cultures (within a particular time period that gives the universal context and force). Tsing states, "Friction gives purchase to universals, allowing them to spread as frameworks for the practice of power. But engaged universals are never fully successful in being everywhere the same because of this same friction." In this statement, it seems that because of friction, engaged universals (those which move through cultures) cannot truly be "universal" because friction changes them and stops them from being "everywhere the same". So, is there such a thing as the universal in the presence of friction? When reading Tsing, it seems as though there is, but how? I'd really like to discuss universals more and how friction changes them. I think that particulars in each culture change the universal as it moves from locality to locality as it encounters friction, but I'd like to explore this more specifically.

the physics of disjuncture

2009-11-30T16:59:00.000-08:00

Anna Tsing’s notion of “friction” across cultures in the process of global expansion immediately brought to mind Arjun Appadurai’s understanding of “global cultural flow” (Appadurai 6). Both Tsing and Appadurai discuss the site of disjuncture, a concept that becomes increasingly more visible and more applicable as globalization spreads and localities clash with global forces. However, friction and flow are somewhat opposite actions.

My question is, what leads to their different understandings of contact at the sites of disjunction? Appadurai’s analysis of the ‘scapes that constitute the global economy is structured, organized, and mostly devoid of affect, an effect that Jameson tells us is characteristic of the postmodern era. He constructs abstract forms of geography that correspond to the changing modes of contact from physical to virtual in the global economy. Tsing, on the other hand, bases her entire argument on the reinsertion of affect. As she describes in the preface, her research was incited by narratives she encountered at the local level. Affect underlies the relation between global and local for her as she constantly witnessed people getting “caught up in their emotions”. She “locates the global” at the local sites of disjunction, of “awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference” (4). The disjunctures make visible the “frictions of encounter”, and thus occur in a very material way.

I can’t help wondering, Does the fact that Tsing writes fifteen years later than Appadurai play a major role in the differences in their understanding of movement? Tsing’s topic is very specifically embedded in geography and the social sphere. Is she able to do this because of the course which globalization has taken is more developed and more apparently applicative to local cultures than it was in 1990? Or is it irrelevant to compare the two analyses historically and in the context of temporality? Perhaps something occurs at the disjunction between the two sources, and it is the play between flow and friction that makes up the dynamics of globalization and its effect on the local?

It might also be interesting to think about the essay we read on Google Earth’s Darfur project as another oppositional approach to Tsing in terms of the localization of globalization. I always bring it up, but what fascinates me is the failure of this project compared to other potential successes of humanitarian projects. Is it possible to incite the emergence of affect, to get the reaction Tsign gets on the material, local level on a global scale? Google Earth certainly did not help in the way it meant to with the Crisis in Darfur, is that because it wasn’t touching the local in the right way? Is it because the stories came from a westernized, primarily visual and technical lens and not directly from the land and from the culture that the project failed to produce the needed affect?

Disruption

2009-11-30T14:48:00.000-08:00

I was intrigued by Jonah Brucker-Cohen work to subvert networks. In class, we often discuss the construction and sustainment of said networks but who is working within to destroy them?

In fact, how is it possible for a revolutionary to de-struct a network? It seems there is a level of disavowal and complicity in these acts. Brucker-Cohen works with the infrastructure to dis-able it. In that case, is he not using the same tools? Does he not contribute to the preponderance of the technology? Why is selling the software (for cash) on his website? He is capitalist in the techno-age.

Brucker-Cohen also uses human responses to universalize his work. By utilizing physical displays (reactions based on human action) he engenders himself to the consumer. Note his human female voice that emitted from birdhouses around NYC. He uses a woman's voice (or, obviously recognizable as some stereotypical female fem-bot fantasy voice) that glibly chirps vapid (and vaguely cinematic) cliches. We recognize the robot because she is acting the part. Our own recognizance and subsequent complicity makes us impassioned about the work. We even feel injured when it doesn't go the "right" way say, if a policeman takes the birdhouse down. Brucker-Cohen "engages" us on a human level with his technological work.

His presentation on how the kinetic becomes the real was also engrossing. The drill drilling into the wall or his "Police State" installation showed the physical interpretations of an active "online" (or "networked") world. I have to question the ideology and follow-through, all the same. His choices bely an obvious flexibility in interpretation. Why so literal? Why a drill actually hitting a building? Why toy police cars? It seems tame and even a bit quaint. I feel like there is a deeper level of operation available here. The police state that was crafted at the time of his installation had more to do with an ethnographic, xenophobic, and paranoid lens than something as cartoonish as toys zipping around. Hitting a website says more about one's culture, class, intent, and education than just a literal "hitting". Why so simple, I wonder?

I did appreciate Mr. Brucker-Cohen's work in how it brought up many questions for me concerning networks and performance art.

-Nick White

relevant article

2009-11-29T23:15:00.001-08:00

courtesy of the NYT, "Tree Harvester Offers to Save Indonesian Forest";

it seems to illustrate some of Tsing's claims pretty well, both in reported content and form of reporting.

Medical Information and the Outbreak Narrative

2009-11-29T21:10:00.000-08:00

In last week's section, we discussed different forms of marking and the stigmas that accompany them in Wald's outbreak narrative. This investigation led me to consider yet another form of marking: marks created by medical record (mis)management and, more specifically, the new mark created by the online transmission of medical information. Communications between doctor and patient are generally considered to confidential, but in the digital age - an age in which information becomes less and less stable - new possibilities for an accessible and rapidly communicable mark are made possible. Take for example this Brown University Health Services agreement, composed in 2003:

"E-mail can be immediately broadcast worldwide and be received by many intended and unintended recipients. E-mail is not a “secure” means of communication.

Recipients can forward e-mail messages to other recipients without the original sender’s permission or knowledge.

Users can easily misaddress an e-mail message.

E-mail may be altered and is easier to falsify than handwritten or signed documents.

Backup copies of e-mail may exist even after the sender or the recipient has deleted his/her copy.

E-mail containing information pertaining to a patient’s diagnosis and/or treatment constitutes a part of the patient’s medical record.

All e-mail may be discoverable in litigation regardless of whether it is in a patient’s medical record. [...]

I understand the assumptions stated above and that e-mail is not a secure means of communication. I am aware that the provider may decline to communicate via e-mail based upon the nature of the medical information. I give permission for Health Services to electronically communicate with me."

The proposal is unsettling. The language used to describe electronic records mirrors Wald's language of the contagious outbreak and underscores the possibility of an informational mark with a viral nature that is easily altered and transmitted. Such language makes the patient aware that medical information circulated online could be kept alive as easily as the contagion it might address. Like a virus, the nature of email permits it to make copies of itself, and become "molecular shark, a motive without a mind' (43). The way in which the medical system communicates becomes more and more like a metaphor for the harm it seeks to curtail. Information about carriers, contagions, and the victims they touch, becomes contagious itself. Wald reminds readers that the "word contagion literally means 'to touch together', and one of its earliest uses in the fourteenth century referred to the circulation of ideas and attitudes. It frequently connoted danger or corruption. Revolutionary ideas were contagious, as were heretical beliefs and practices. […] The medical use of the term was no less metaphorical than its ideational counterpart" (12). Both metaphorical uses incite fear.

At the same time, Wald's own description of a viral web continually echoes the structure of internet communication. She explains how the "explosion of a disease outbreak into an epidemic or pandemic marks, in this formulation, the tragic consequences of human behavior amplified by the web" (23). She also says, "A Hot Virus in the rainforest lives within a twenty-four hour plane flight from every city on earth. […] All of the earth's cities are connected by a web of airline routes. The web is a network. Once a virus hits the net, it can shoot anywhere in a day" (35). Whether one is shooting and email or a virus, the vocabulary is consistent.

In the same way that "communicable disease marks the potential destruction of the community and the consequence of its survival," the internet both creates new hope for communities of victims, as well as new possibilities for indelible marks and de-stabilized systems of confidential doctor-patient communications. Wald's condition for the containment of contagions, the "endless vigilance on the part of people we never see" (22), is the same unreasonable and perhaps unattainable condition for the curtailment of viral digital information and and the unprecedented marks that it makes possible.

Everyone Loves to Hug (Important) Trees

2009-11-27T12:38:00.000-08:00

If a developer today attempted to come near the Sequoia National Park in northern California with plans to remove trees, extend touristic ventures, build a hotel, even erect a viewing platform, he would be stopped.

He would be stopped by locals from nor cal, he would be stopped by fellow Americans, he would be stopped by people from across both oceans.

Aside from our hypothetical people, however, what exactly is creating this thrust for conservation, this need to "save" something so relatively local to one area? Why might people from around the world care about this particular spot, a "national" treasure?

I would argue that the draw here for so many concerns that which Tsing begins to tackle on page 200 of Friction, "landscape and memory," in particular, collective memory.

Somewhere like Sequoia National Park -- perhaps for my purposes not unlike places/treasures like Machu Picchu, Patagonia, Yellowstone's geysers --- hold memories for many, a vital note for conservationists like those working with the Meratus forest. The memories built up around Redwood Trees have created myths of their beauty and size. Granted thousands if not millions of people have visited the national park itself, images of the Park and its trees proliferate through the Internet, through postcards, through history books, through family photos, and more.

The Park itself has become a site of converging memories-- now fed additionally through tourism. Collective memory that transcends state or even national lines has enveloped this site. At stake in disrupting it is now the history of place (California since its founding), the history of person (those who have visited), and maybe most importantly, the imagined history and imagined beauty of place (thriving on myths and fleeting images of the place). People are collectively, are universally bent on "saving" this place.

So why not the same with the Meratus forest? In contrast to the Sequoia National Park, the Meratus forest has not "already been claimed for the shadows of nationalist elite imaginations" (201). And surely this is good. Perhaps it is better that the many local tribes, the various communities might share in the many memories that converge in this forest... or perhaps, more accurately, there was a time when this sort of remembrance was better.

But why not also consider that what is risked here, what is lost in such partial, localized, and fragmented memory abandons the hope of a unified saviour. A unified saving of place in place of many, small and ultimately hopeless attempts to prevent the mass force of global development (ie. greed).

Local seems to be tackling global in the Meratus forest, and Tsing points out which is the losing side. But must it be so--- what if a more unified, larger sense of 'mattering' took root here? Might this save Meratus?

Or is something like memory all too reliant on the past and thus unable to transform the present?

Mapping the Outbreak

2009-11-26T19:27:00.000-08:00

Wald's book, Contagious maps the way in which the spread of disease can be used to map a community. This text made me question the way noncommunicable disease can similarly be used to imagine or map a community. One could quickly bring up statistics that show how much more prominent schizophrenia is in western (as opposed to eastern) society, or a plethora of diseases that one never sees in America or Europe.

Wald's focus on "contagions" as opposed to disorders allows her to focus on the materiality of disorders. In fact, it's this biological focus that enables her mapping. When the focus shifts from contagion to disease, we find more powerfully stratified cultural limits that don't actively illustrate these international flows which make up the majority of Wald's discussion. This breakdown of disorder and contagion, on the other hand, allows us to map something entirely different: the immateriality of these communities, and their culturally constructed differences.

The differences, unlike "thirdworldization" and "modernization" are more refined. They are differences that can't be quantified or explained. Unlike the "contagious" which can be defined--the microbes can be found--disorders don't have definable origins. While microbes can be mapped, disorders are sites where biopower takes control. The disordered is institutionalized. If there is a contagion, the institution works to contain it. Medicines work on the contagion itself, while institutions work on the individual. Why don't the disordered make neat maps? It seems to me--though this is only a tentative answer--that the disordered individual is always still an individual. One can count the number of names of people with any given disorder, but they will always still mark individuals. The site of the individual always seems to fight the totalizing and generalizing capacity of a map and the way in which it attempts to abstract these entities.

Mapping and the Outbreak Narrative

2009-11-24T06:41:00.001-08:00

Priscilla Wald’s discussion of the American carrier and general outbreak narratives as transformative powers in constructing the “spatial and social relationships of a community” (Contagious 113) brought to mind the discussion we had a couple weeks ago about mapping with respect to De Certeau and Lisa Parks. Lisa Parks, in her analysis of Google Earth’s “Crisis in Darfur” project, describes how the overloading of information through images, through visibility, results in inaction. She proposes that the image has lost its power to construct a powerful narrative and thus to incite action or play a role in putting pressure on Americans to reconstruct their identity with respect to those in Darfur. As we discussed in section, De Certeau poses that the voyeur (whether standing atop the World Trade Center or looking at pictures atop their desk chair at home) is blind compared to the walker. The voyeur sees all but constructs no subjective narrative, and thus cannot play a part in defining the spatial world in which he exists.

If mapping is just the making visible, the charting, of what already exists geographically (or socially), then it seems to me that Wald is describing the mapping and spatially defining role of outbreak narratives in a similar way that De Certeau describes the walker. Or rather, the potential that walking, that individual movement has in mapping, e.g., a city is embedded in the narrative of the carrier/the outbreak. Wald writes, “The narrative of Typhoid Mary serves in [stead of familial connections of personal motivations], charting the movements of the peripatetic cook as it ‘places’ her in social, ultimately historical terms” (95). She terms the healthy carrier a “human vector” and potently notes how,

the healthy human being turned pathogen called attention to the bodily interconnectedness of people living in and moving through the shared spaces of cities and of the nation. The story of Typhoid Mary helped to fashion the experience of those spaces. (70)

Thus it is these narratives that map out “the new models of being in the world” (70) and play a real role in constructing our perception of space in our community. I always bring in Jameson when it is perhaps not the most pertinent to our discussion, but I have to ask: is this a hint at the cognitive mapping for which he calls in understanding the networked relationships in society? Wald describes the narrative of how invisible, “foreign” pathogens, or forces, are made visible, mapped, and then subsequently used as a tool in mapping our relationships as , e.g., Americans with respect to the rest of the world.

Do the narratives do a better job in inciting action and mapping out existence because they pose a threat to us as Americans? Are we only able to help if the help we are giving is to ourselves? Or is it just that communication needs to happen through a channel of interconnectedness (unlike the far-away, almost stock images of Darfur on Google Earth) to reach to us?

another cog in an ideological mechanism

2009-11-23T23:50:00.000-08:00

For me, the most interesting contention of Wald's book was the way in which primitivism, nature, poverty and the racial/sexual other are conflated and blurred. One example that Wald provides is a third-party description of Michael Callen:

"[He had] frequented every sex club and bathhouse between the East River and the Pacific Ocean and had gathered enough venereal and parasitical diseases to make his medical chart look like that of some sixty-five-year-old Equitorial African living in squalor." (238)

This erasure of discursive rigor + naturalized combination of otherwise discrete behaviors + identities is what paves the way for the moralizing and policing of bodies-- I'm thinking of biopolitics in Foucault's sense and formulation.

What's interesting about this to me is that while disease is the focus of this book, it is by no means the centerpiece of the ideological mechanism which is serves. Wald herself takes great pains to make clear that it is not parasites, disease, and outbreak which source such biopolitics, but the narrativization thereof. (One great dissected example is provided on pp 6-7, by photo).

While disease narrativization is Wald's focus, her analysis extends far beyond that. Her emphasis on narrative incriminates discourse, and the naturalized interweaving of discourse with physicality. It is not disease which is the enemy in this context; it is both the discursion surrounding/penetrating it, and the ability to perceive such behavior as causal/logical/natural.

Identifying disease as only a provisional/specific focus of Wald's greater observation, it seems that the true relevation is a familiar one: the unceasing entrance of the body into discourse. Wald is interested in "re-writing" such narratives on ethical grounds, but I wonder if this will only perpetuate the naturalized discursion of the body. Will new stories be enough? Or does Wald's work reiterate a need to resist discourse--if that's even possible--and imagine ourselves beyond language? Wald made clear that the body is at stake here, and it is often pitted against discourse. So, what to do?

Being/Social-Being

2009-11-23T23:33:00.000-08:00

"Since bacteriologists and their advocates worked to locate, record, and track carriers, rather than to alleviate the conditions in which diseases like typhoid flourished, [Mendlesohn] argues, the carrier state they theorized maintains, as it exemplified, the bifurcation between the scientific and the social." (78)

The story of Typhoid Mary, Wald argues, is fundimentally one of "the metamorphosis from an individual to a social being" (78). The individual is monitored for the sake of the whole (nation), and removed from 'free' individual existence so they may be placed under the careful watch of experts, who will contain the disease. The monitoring of individuals is not something that simply takes place on a higher level; it manipulates the national affect to instill each individual with a sense of duty for the greater nation, to keep themselves clean and watch for potential outbreaks.

The sort of dissonances in the figure of the 'individual' here is quite bizarre. At each level, individual bodies are threatened by the outside; the individual is both a 'responsible citizen' and a global threat requiring containment; the nation is dependent on outsiders, immigrants, for diversity and population health, but faces the danger of microbes potentially carried by these people; the individual nation's "recognizable self" is threatened: "the sovereignty, the home, and, by extension, the larger community, the nation, by which that 'self' is defined" (82).

As mentioned above, Wald attributes these dissonances to a metamorphosis from the individual to social being that takes place the moment a carrier is infected; it is in this sense that Mendlesohn's argument comes into play, as we can now see that, indeed, the existence of discreet contagions is completely ignored in the arguments above, as the actual disease can only be represented in the social being as a node within the social being, an individual. This approach misses "structural inequalities" (to borrow a term used often by students met in D.C.) that literally breed the diseases; as a sort of probabilistic sink that one enters or is born into, poverty creates a certain set of conditions around the individual that can probably not be escaped (but could certainly be appropriated), a set of conditions that generally tends to be conducive to disease. (Note: it is in this sense that Wald reveals herself as a liberal following Thomas Pogge, who sought to explore Rawls' assertion that the institutions of society should always be most beneficial to the least advantaged people, to equalize natural contingencies)

So the problem is in the way the system of global health is constructed, the various initial rules being used to describe it. So, two questions: first, how can the medical world construct a new outbreak system to deal with said structural inequalities, and second, how can one find a general set of rules to revise systems broken by their ignorance of various social forces? Yes, a perfect system is impossible, but exploring methods of revising systems to cohere with morality could have some powerful consequences.

Difference: the specter of susceptibility

2009-11-23T22:21:00.000-08:00

Priscilla Wald's Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative offers a enlightening account of a terrifying phenomena. This phenomena is not the emergence of life-threatening disease that humanity faces but rather the complex process of narrativization of the diseases in both scientific and cultural (media) texts. These stories that emerge form for Wald the "outbreak narrative," which she states,

...is itself like the epidemiological map and the electron microscope, a tool for making the invisible appear; it borrows, attests to, and helps construct expertise. The points on the epidemiologist's map and the organism under the researcher's microscope make little sense without the story that is told about transmission. And that story cannot acount for the spread of the disease without registering the interactions that bear witness to the connections of human communities, which ar conceived simultaneously on local, national, and global scales. The outbreak narrative manages the consequences, as it makes sense of, what the communicable disease makes visible (39).

In this way the "outbreak narratives" function in the way that narratives including myths have served humanity for centuries. These narratives, while specific, offer an an interpretative potential for those studying and tracking diseases and the cultures they threaten.

One of the interesting thing that I find is that in her study of Typhoid and HIV/AIDS, deadly disease that would seem to show susceptibility and therefore some biologizing equivalence of mankind invoke differences to label and separate the infected and "carriers" from the rest of the population. In Wald's study of Mary Mallon or "Typhoid Mary" one sees the sexuated and gendered role the disease takes in relation to potential carriers. Beyond the association of female promiscuity with infection, "all women were potential carriers" (106). Diseases cause particular individuals and identities to become embodiments of the disease and reversely gender the diseases.

In the case of HIV/AIDS this occurs in the conflation of the emerging medical mystery with the gay male population it first begins to ravish. Later this is shifted to a racialized view of the HIV virus in two ways. In the first Wald depicts how the origins of the virus cause it to become "africanized," and even "primitivized." Beyond this ontological discovery that emerges in the narrative of HIV/AIDS, the invocation of an "African AIDS," that still haunts media depictions of this health problem show how a continent comes to marks some imagined difference.

It is extremely disturbing to see how these markers of difference emerge in the outbreak narratives in ways that are both constraining on the individuals who may or may not be infected and limiting for the medical and social community which seek to eliminate these threats against humanity.

Late post for last weeks response: New Media and the problem of translation

2009-11-23T22:05:00.000-08:00

Jonah Bucker-Cohen's lecture was an interesting perspective of a new media artist/researcher and the complexity of his body of work. This lecture though caused me to revisit some of the personal problems or questions I have regarding new media projects and their potential to open some of the discourses they propose to engage with. One problem I see is the conflicting potentials for collaborative and critical projects that are limited to those with the expendable capital and expertise that allows one to work with such complicated and specific materials. Another is the issue of translating the digital into the physical or social and vice versa.

One of Brucker-Cohen's projects directly tackled this second concern. A sort-of reverse physical computing installation in which a jackhammer would begin to destroy a physical space for every "hit" to a specific website. While the term "hit" embodies some destructive qualities I utterly confused as to how digital visits correlate to a destructive demonstration in physical space. One issue I see with this is a problem in translating the virtual space of a website too the physical space. What is the relationship between the physical space that is destroyed and the website that is visited? Are the websites inherently linked to these physical spaces (f0r example, are the "hits" that cause the jackhammer to embody this data "hits" on the gallery's website?). This project whether intentionally or not seems to connote web activity with destruction of space, yet I do not know this to be true when regarding virtual space.

As I know many of my questions and concerns stem from both a lack of knowledge regarding such an active and productive movement and issues of capital inherently linked to technological projects I look to the upcoming conference for new insights and challenges to my assumptions.

Disaster Nationalism

2009-11-23T21:57:00.000-08:00

The narrative of disease is a nationalistic one, as Priscilla Wald shows in her book "Contagious: Cultures, Carriers and the Outbreak Narrative". Her telling of the the spread of AIDs in North America highlights this, and she claims that since World War II and the emergence of the study of virology, viruses and contagions have been tied to the war narrative. This is most evident in the 1980s, when the conflation of the Cold War narrative and that of the HIV virus brought about the notion of the virus as an "intruder" and "invader", brought to America through outsiders (Wald 156-7). For America, who shares borders with relatively few countries, disease penetration into the continent signifies a breach of boundary and an invasion into American territory. Viruses, though neutral in and of themselves, have to be incubated and spread through human carriers. The "third worldification" of disease, whereby disease is characterized as emerging from Africa and Asia further creates a fear of the outsider, and of the diseases originating from the dark continents.

Through the narrative of the infectious outsider, disease has thus been used as a tool of nationalism. In May, amidst threats of a global pandemic of Swine Flu, President Mubarak ordered the slaughter of the 300,000 pigs in Cairo. Largely owned by the the Coptic Christian community, the pigs were the livelihood of the zabaleen Coptics, the trashmen who feed the organic trash they collect to the pigs, and then later sell and eat the pigs. In an overwhelmingly Muslim nation, pigs are only raised and eaten by the Coptic Christians. The cultural attitudes by the Muslim population towards pigs as dirty creatures not to be eaten are enhanced by the emergence of Swine Flu and the move for the mass slaughter of all pigs was seen as an attack on the Christian community and their way of life. By culling the pigs, Mubarak and his regime are thus imposing their set of beliefs and their lifestyle upon the people of Cairo.

Despite these measures, deemed misguided by newspapers and medical authorities, Swine Flu still founds its way into Cairo through American students studying at the American University in Cairo, prompting the closure of the university for two weeks. Consequently, the trash problem in Cairo has only worsened without the presence of pigs to consume organic waste.

Suffering from low support, and highly influenced by the previous SARS outbreak, the government of Hong Kong decided in June to take severe precautionary measures towards Swine Flu, all kindergarten and primary school for the rest of the school year, as well as any school with a student infected with Swine Flu. Perhaps the most well-known incident is the quarantine of an entire hotel and plane following the identification of Swine Flu. Given the population density in Hong Kong and the reliance on public transportation, the spread of any disease would be swift. However, as the government began contemplating the closure of all secondary schools, newspaper reports began reporting ulterior motives behind the extreme measures: The government, these reports claimed (in Chinese), was attempting to create panic and fear within the population in order to garner support for itself and to unite and rally the population. Disasters have that ability, as the US experienced following 9/11 and Katrina. Hong Kong's government, according to these newspapers, was attempting to create that atmosphere. However, the mildness of Swine Flu and its low death rate prevented real panic from taking hold.

Nonetheless, it is evident that both the Hong Kong and Egyptian governments attempted to use the Swine Flu epidemic towards their own goals, and to create a "disaster nationalism" whereby the community would be united by a common threat. Rather than a notion of patriotism, nations are then united by fear. Disease is one example, terrorism is another. Unlike the 20th century, whereby fear was directed at specific nations, the 21st century threat is defined by transnationalism and amorphism.

hermeneutics, viro-logic

2009-11-23T20:16:00.000-08:00

"There is no practice except by and in ideology" -- Louis Althusser ("I&ISA," 244)

"It is not only possible but time to change the stories and the world they imagine" --Priscilla Wald (270)

Wald's Contagious masterfully weaves together the historical development and past instances of the "outbreak narrative," almost a genre in itself with stock characters, a well-defined story arc, and potentially dangerous effects. Wald's mode of narrative analysis precedes almost epidemiologically, locating SARS narratives as only the latest outbreak of the outbreak narrative, which has mutated from Oedipus through Typhoid Mary, Body Snatchers and Patient Zero. Yet it seems that Wald is fascinated by the virologists method, their viro-logic: "the identification of a virus generated a viral narrative" (216); narratives "inflect--and yes, infect--every aspect of . . . scientific and epidemiological processes" (262). Wald posits narrative as itself infectious, begging the question of method: that is, of hermeneutics as virology.

If, as Althusser claims, there is no practice outside ideology, is there any reason that Wald should not mobilize the power of the virus-narrative to her own ends, mobilizing a sort of critical retrovirus that insinuates itself into the narratives of epidemiology and virology, of novels, newspapers and films, in order to expose the consequences of their myth-making? Can (or must) a critique of outbreak narratives partake of those narratives' resources?

Perhaps there is no practice outside ideology, but it does seem that there are plenty of critical resources available outside discourses of infection and contagion that would be more useful in describing the mechanisms that distribute cultural narratives. Wald asks us to take her sources--scientific journals, magazines, novels, newspapers, popular films--as examples of outbreak narratives; the profusion of examples, like the profusion of a virus, attests to the narrative's endurance. Wald then couples these dispersed examples with historical effects: public health regulations that target impoverished immigrant communities; the militarization of immunological language (and vice-versa); bypassing a "critique of social and economic conditions that affect drug use as well as healthcare" (248). There seems to be a viro-logic governing the relationships between the narrative's causes (narrative as effect) and the narrative's effects (narrative as cause); narrative takes on a kind of recursivity, simultaneously drawing upon and reinforcing social stigmatization & specific models of virology. Narratives are infectious, like a virus, but they are also infected, like a host.

So it is a question of vectors of infection; for Wald they seem to go from power to power, from mainstream journalism to government policy, from prestigious scientific research to hollywood cinema and back again. In a word, it appears to me that Wald makes a somewhat unquestioned notion of cultural dominance perform a lot of conceptual work, and in so doing reproduces the very exclusions she decries. We need to look at how U.S. policies thirdworldify the 'primitive' farms of Guangzhou, Wald says; but her analysis instead veers off into the New York Times, Scientific American and I Am Legend. Even William Burroughs' virus trilogy is mobilized to show the prevalence of "viral culture." These sources function as a kind of "Patient Zero" for Wald--perhaps they are not the undisputed origin of a certain narrative, but she assumes that they play a major role in spreading it throughout the population.

Even if analyses of such a dominant culture hold fast for different moments in history dominated by large-circulation newspapers, magazines, and televisions, how do new media (youtube, blogs, RSS feeds, online confessions, twitter, etc.) "inf(l)ect" the outbreak narrative?Networked media are often described as viral (e.g., viral videos), spreading information through a promiscuous milieu composed of fleeting contacts, promiscuous packet switching, and hubs of distribution (superspreaders?). Terranova's analysis of media ecologies can help us here. Although Terranova allows for mass forms, nationalist / scientifically rationalist narratives that Wald highlights do not take hold in the mass as such. Althusser is again relevant: "there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects" (244). The mass is preindividual and collective; subjects, the correlates of ideologies, are the products of functions of subjectification, such as the "selfish gene", which recast genes (which, like viruses, merely replicate or don't) as egotistical actors.

Hermeneutics, deciphering the deep meanings of texts, must draw upon a kind of source that grounds the text's meaning; Wald's virological hermeneutics are grounded in the imagining subject who is called upon (interpellated) to maintain the integrity of the nation. Yet what if the notion of subjectivity that lends Wald's method its power is also a stumbling block to "chang[ing] the stories and the world they imagine" (Wald 270)?

The contradiction I'm attempting to present can be stated more simply: Wald insists that viruses, contrary to their depiction in many outbreak narratives, are not evil or intentionally malicious entities; furthermore, to personify a virus as malicious is to elide from the social factors that enable or exacerbate its effects; yet Wald, claiming that the outbreak narrative itself is infectious, elides some of the social factors that enable, exacerbate or trouble its effects--namely, by taking products of mainstream media as indices of cultural attitudes that she then decries, often at the expense of developing an alternative narrative. I argue that she does this because creating an alternative narrative of epidemics may force her to go beyond a hermeneutic method grounded in the subject of an ostensibly dominant ideology.

In a word: Wald claims a need for that which she does not deliver--a new narrative that is engaged with the specificity of the contemporary situation, a specificity that is likely more fine-grained than a study of dominant U.S., Western, or scientific ideology. Perhaps if Wald more clearly located the mechanisms of power in her analysis (instead of spending so much time on narratives that she presumes reflect/affect Americans, Westerners, or scientists based on their publication in mainstream press) resistances would emerge more clearly, beyond the confines of the subject-supposed-to-know-the-dominant-narrative.

(Fair warning: I have not yet read Chapter 3--perhaps it will challenge my analysis; but for a large portion of the book at least, I hope my criticisms hold water. Also: HIV as metaphor (dissimulating/insinuating the improper within the proper), virus as inherently opposed to logic/reason, and language as virus á la Burroughs have made appearances in several earlier drafts of this post--would love to hear if anyone has something worked out more concretely!)

just for fun: Gertrude Stein reads "If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso "

The Healthy Carrier

2009-11-23T20:08:00.000-08:00

In the chapter, “The Healthy Carrier,” Wald provides the example of Typhoid Mary as an example of the deployment of the narrative for means of social control:

“The story had to turn theories – in this case, the discoveries of bacteriological research – into plausible explanations, and technical terms and concepts into the ‘truths’ of lived experience” (Wald 70).

For Wald, the threat that the emergence of the healthy carrier brought with it was one that provided the foundation for epidemiological efficacy. The scientific data and research was used a means of interpretation and explanation of social phenomena. Epidemiology provided the grounds for containment, social exclusion and the looming threat that the healthy carrier always already had within the realm of the social.

What the emergence of the healthy carrier also brought was yet another reason for the need to know the body, to examine, and analyze it. Although Wald makes clear the changing nature of the narrative, one thing remains consistent throughout – the intimate link of viruses to bodies. Bodies, even healthy ones, are still susceptible and therefore always suspect to disease. Bodies are inscribed with disease or a threat, an excess of signification. The focus on corporeality is most highlighted in Wald’s discussion of the healthy carrier:

“For public-health workers, the healthy carrier was ‘not merely a passive transmitter of infection’ but ‘also a breeding-ground and storehouse of these specific organisms’ that offered ‘the best explanation for the maintenance of the infection in communities’ (Wald 69).

Here, it is also important to note that one’s fundamental being becomes tied not only the corporeal body, but also to one’s place within the social body. And Wald makes very clear that it is not just narratives of every-body, but also there are layers of bodies that are more susceptible, diseases that become gendered or racialized.

One final thought: Although this thought is not clearly thought out, I could not help but think of the subversive element of the virus. Viruses are seen as posing a threat to ‘humanity’, the role of the virus or disease seen as something fundamentally non-human. The study of disease and viruses, however, is inherently linked with the study of bodies. But we must also ask ourselves what is at stake in this? This is what I think Wald points to over and over again and questions.

It is the desire to know that drives knowledge-production, both sociologically and biologically. So perhaps we need to look into the potential danger of placing subjects fully into realm of representation, where everything can be found out or discovered. However, the presence and potential of a virus points to an incalculability of the individual, the inability to ever fully know the subject. Perhaps the impossibility of ever being able to fully represent subjects offers a potential and the role of the virus in the social order also subverts power, even as it might help perpetuate it. The question I am left with after this thought is, “What is left over in this exchange and what is its potential?”

Woman-As-Threat

2009-11-23T18:23:00.000-08:00

I found Wald's exploration of Typhoid Mary absolutely fascinating. By discussing how Mary was portrayed in the media around the time of the massive typhoid epidemic, Wald seems to uncover a sticky trail of gender-related residue left behind the media in their unforgiving attack on Mary as the healthy carrier of a national threat. In following Mary across the country by uncovering her contagion "footprints", Soper uncovers a slew of social faux pas committed by the previously unknown Mary Mallon and reveals them to the public, (inadvertently?) attaching all sorts of gender-related issues to the topic of typhoid fever. Of utmost importance, and fairly removed from Mary's femininity was the issue of food regulations and sanitation, for Mary was a cook, and her position got all of her employers sick. Before Mary and other healthy carriers in Europe and Asia were discovered, typhoid was believed to have been caused purely by contaminated fluids, dirtied in the national sewage system. However, with the discovery of Mary's ability to pass the disease through contact, a transition occurred from fear of invisible microbes to fear of filthy (and overpopulated) environments and contact. Also, Mary's status as an irish immigrant created a certain xenophobia that revealed itself in the known immigrant districts of industrial areas. As Mary continued to avoid Soper, he uncovered more and more of her life and began to attach gender-related issues to her status as healthy carrier.

Wald states, "Fallen-women narratives accompanied these outbursts. They encompassed a variety of stories and genres unified by their condemnation of female sexuality that was not sanctioned by the state through marriage." In this, she [Wald] refers to Soper's propensity to link Mary's filth (in referring to her disease and in describing her home) to her sexual promiscuity. Soper's accounts also linked nicely to a progression in the view of venereal diseases at the time and aided in identifying females as "weak receptors" of venereal disease. Also, Mary's constant movement (and multiple sexual partners) called attention to a recent cultural "move toward greater female agency and mobility, [which] prompted renewed attention to the problem of female sexuality and its consequences."Important in this, is a shift from the conception of woman as the bearer of life to woman as the carrier of disease (both venereal and other). There are many more parts of Wald's discussion of Typhoid Mary that I would love to discuss in section, but what I found of significant importance was the societal movement in the understanding of woman-as-victim to woman-as-threat caused by Soper's attack of Mary in the press and medical journals.

Hybred

2009-11-23T13:10:00.000-08:00

“[outbreak stories] conspicuously turn the threat of disease emergence into an apocalyptic battle between heroic scientists and the hybrids who embody the threat (257)”

I was very interested in the passage above and how this opposition to hybridity serves to illustrate broader authoritative, univocal hegemony over consciousness. Especially since the discovery that viruses are not simply parasites but actually shape the life which they infect. In the lecture Wald spoke of biologization of life, what are the consequences of this process if it seen as a dialectical one, in which a foreboding hybrid, such as "Typhoid Mary," posits her identity as the result of a synthesis of host and parasite. How does this hybred induced anxiety translate in how other types of hybreds, such as those of a racial and cultural, as well as sexual base.

Re. Wald

2009-11-23T11:28:00.000-08:00

Of particular interest in Wald's book, Contagious, are the areas where she references public health problems of the past to validate her claims of the outbreak narrative and potential of disease to create such a narrative, yet oddly seems to avoid the present.

Granted, I have not read the entire book, I find this problematic and would like to discuss wherein lie the problems. For one, when she writes about Chicago doctor Albert H. Burr that "[his] nation was distinctly white and at least middle class" (86), I wonder to what degree this exclusivity of medical attention remains. Certainly more than Wald addresses here....

...

On the next page, Wald delves into another very relevant and more complex, interesting topic -- the representational power of venereal disease "derived from its confounding of the distinction between the social and the medical." Wald's jargon here leans towards the negative, with words such as "perpetrators," "victims," "disrupts," and phrases like "dangerously physical. " And surely Wald is making a valid indictment about the polarizing, contentious, more-often-than-not ill-willed media -- something that media seems to have always and surely continues to be. Yet my question then is how might this bending of the medical towards the social, the convergence of the two, be seen positively? What might we risk in solely analyzing the medical and ignoring the social or vice versa? Can the two be separated and still affect public to act?

Perhaps we might look at the H1N1 pandemic and discuss how it is conflating the social with the medical?

Or am I overlooking something in Wald's text, confusing her argument with another...

up for discussion.

...

A final point of potential discussion is within a specific point in the text, on pg. 241. Wald writes, " The epidemic turns an emblem of national pride, the consequence of new global formations that rhetorically culminate in U.S. nationalism, into a national threat: out of many, one. AIDS is the disease of (too much) democracy; epidemiology exposes the danger of the political ideal as a desire that results in a racialized microbiotic hybridity."

My questions here concern both the actual ideas that Wald is quoting and further, her own support of them (or, what seems like her support of them). Firstly, I'd like to discuss the notion of AIDS as an "emblem of national pride," and debate whether this is a valid claim to be making... how does this national pride, this source of nationalism differ from others that we have looked at (say, Anderson's definition/ historicization of nationalism)? Isn't AIDS perhaps just the opposite, a divisive national issue. Though Wald acknowledges this morphing of the emblem into a "threat," I'm not sure that she's even starting with a valid point.

Further, if AIDS originally stemmed from Africa, how can it be the disease of "too much democracy" -- simply because Americans didn't "catch" this "threat" at the border, or because they hesitate to acknowledge their own error, one says that AIDS represents "democracy"??? Not sure about that either... perhaps a jumping-off point might be Wald's discussion of democracy, another important term for our course.

Insta-Sensation

2009-11-23T09:15:00.000-08:00

-aaron wee

Why has the global response to Swine Flu been so politically charged? Talk about bad timing - Contagious would have loved to have been written just a year later and soak in the network culture's response to probably the mildest flu epidemic in generations.

I remember that horribly cynical, snarky, and just plain mean period of media coverage in early 2009 when the mainstream media was crying out about "Mexican Swine Flu". Popular conceptions within the developed world were more than willing to buy into this narrative - that the poor conditions within Mexican farms generated the right biological conditions for this new H1N1 strain. Oh no, it could in no way have come from those paradigms of modern hygiene across the border in American factory farms where the pigs get inoculated with thousands of vaccines... oh wait. Immediately after these and subsequent reports casting doubt on the flu's origins, MSM's use of the term "Mexican Swine Flu" dropped : this is Google News' aggregate of all news stories using the term "Mexican Swine Flu" - notice the sharp sudden rise after March and the precipitous decline after May.

Strangely, the term "North American Swine Flu" never caught on. Instead, we now use "Swine Flu" and pretend that little bit of "biological racism" never happened. (although agencies like TopNews, the Worcester Telegram, and the (Australian) Daily Telegraph didn't get the memo from the 90s that political correctness was mandatory). Admittedly, this research is flawed in that it is no doubt an English-centric worldview of disease naming...

Because the world just gets crazier.

Serious questions were asked: like, is Swine Flu kosher? Or Halal? Mind you, those were official arguments made by the Israeli Legislature, as reported in Haaretz, and a fatwa issued by an Iman. Not, TopNews. Then, we've got Slovakia closing its borders with Ukraine, the catastrophic failure of Cairo's refuse system, and Poland's vaccine epic-fail. These are serious problems, dealt with ostensibly serious peoples and governments.

And yet, we're all still caught up in a deceitful political narrative decades, or even centuries, in the making. There are strong geo-political biases that have been infected with the outbreak narrative and that persist to this day with its labels and imagined fictions about what a disease can and cannot do, and to whom. Which is why we still have the French Disease and the Spanish Flu - which, surprise, may have been an American strain (see a pattern in deadly flus emerging? or not...).

Wald made a good point by setting up the firsts of her episodes involving the narratives of disease with Outbreak's "African Mercenary Camp" opening. It feeds directly into the popular mythos of wartorn, poverty-stricken, disease-ridden Africa that the Western media is so apt to portray. Even though it was eventually America's networked-flight-connected world that would threaten the survival of the species, even if it was America's lax shipping standards and internal controls, even though it was the American military's absent-minded bio-warfare department's lack of safety and foresight, it was still nice to imagine a foreign cause.

These inherent biases that color and infect our narratives come from deeper political intrigue that have lasted and subsisted on the popular imagination for a very long time. Guangzhou, Wald mentions (35-38), makes the perfect backdrop as exotic China, dirty China, chaotic China, authoritarian China, for the entrance of the Asian Bird Flu.

But why not American Swine Flu? Why not indeed?

Mapping the Affect

2009-11-20T17:07:00.000-08:00

The relationship between mapping and actualizing in de Certeau is a confused one. Yes, the spatial acting-out of the place must be performed for one to move through the city, obtain action, but before this may happen, there is a "process of appropriation" that must take place. In other words, how does one actualize a map without having the map to begin with? Things quickly turn into a sort of Beckett-esq dream where the individual constantly stumbles through (a world? a map? a location? their own mind?) trying to escape any sort of representation, to purely actualize, to even escape the limits of their own material body, to remove the virtual from the world. This is (very generally) the dream of both Barthes and Badrillard; to escape the "myth," the "simulacrum" (neither of which describe the same thing exactly, but do occupy a similar position in both theorist's most famous work). The two use similar methods for their attempt; Barthes subjects his myths to pure critical dissection, tearing apart its language to reveal the sort of psychic, real forces lying underneath (the sort of Freudian theory used in essays such as "Striptease" is clearly pre-Lacan in this respect); Badrillard, observing that the simulacrum destroys what it means to represent, attempts to construct a simulacrum of the simulacrum, so that the recursive implosion allows the real to again shine through. (All of these statements are controversial, I'm sure, but I only mean to make them here as provisional observations to contrast against later observations))
These two stand in stark contrast to Chris Csikszentmihályi and the MIT media lab, who clearly look at a lot of maps and know how to use them. Their projects often involve at least two forms of mapping; either engineering (the mapping of physical structures and forces) or geography (as with his project mapping natural gas wells in Colorado). We can take the comparison to de Certeau even further when we note the use of Google Earth in these projects; the map has been appropriated and (in a sort of feedback loop) can be fed back into the community to inspire collective action; his robots are counter-actualizations of military technology, using military techniques to send a robot out to some mapped blank space (mapped because these blank spaces used to maintain military secrecy are indeed missing spots on the map; even they cannot fully escape cartography). Collecting data on the personal damages caused by these drilling industries can serve as a rallying cry, a way for those suffering to "feel as if they are not alone" (a bit of language borrowed from the queer rights movement); the military counter-actualizations seek to testify for those whose voices have been robbed. The various projects all make powerful use of affects, exploring, connecting, and expanding the reach of social groups through the appropriation and actualization of mapped spaces, returning them to (political) representation. Or, at least a limited power; for as much as the MIT Media Lab's projects energize some, it enrages others: as Chris notes, he feels as if he should have been fired from MIT a while back; old war hawks find nothing challenging in protest-bots, they only see something to oppose.
But there's still one last question that needs to be dug out: what is the relationship of affects to mapping? Clearly, affects are not something that can be used by just leftists, radicals, etc. In fact, one could trace the earliest contemporary use of affects to the GOP's southern strategy, playing off of affects of racism, social conservatism, and general fear of the Other (why else would people like Rudy Giullani go out of his way as much as possible to mention 9/11?) to add the voting block that (in conjunction with traditional fiscal conservatives) would win them several elections. The assumption that liberals don't know how to phrase their message correctly to "connect with the affects of the people" is not a new one, nor is it unique to Terranova (despite the uniqueness of her argument); Chomsky's rival George Lakoff wrote a book around 2003 that, after providing a 'rational' argument for why the 'liberal' state was clearly better than other states, argued that the left just needs to know how to "frame" their arguments in order to sway the votes of the people/public. What seems troubling here is the intensity of the 'rational' argument (Lakoff's starts in bizarre form, arguing that the central difference between conservatives and liberals is the view of the ideal nuclear family), especially as it becomes warped in media-space/scape (Glenn Beck?); different rationalities produce different results, and all of them believe themselves correct to various degrees. With this, I can potentially map the affect as existing around common spaces shared by certain groups (fixed in space; two unions in two states will possibly have different languages for their actions) that are fixed and connected by common axes of logic and rationality. The problem is that, if taken to an extreme (Karl Rove, manipulating emotions of fear to achieve power?), the affect can be very dangerous. There is perhaps a way to get around this; namely, not looking to oppose affects, but expanding them through differing levels of synthesis. Yes, we can't synthesize to the level where certain humans lose identity and humanity, but simple opposition, ressentiment is not going to get us anywhere; in the words of Terranova, "We need a commonly shared affect." This is not just a process of strengthening currently existing affects or opposition to currently existing affects; it's continually creating new ones altogether. But then the question is: how does one synthesize affects (or create new ones) without endangering their own identity, their ability to defend their rights as human?

(note: I don't mean to criticize Chris' work here, the natural gas project in particular (which I can't remember the name of, unfortunately) is wonderful and doesn't really attract the sort of issues developed here, and the sorts of responses garnered by other compcult projects are more complex than is given room to here. I'm just trying to use the work to help me bring things together in my thoughts.)

"Social" Technology

2009-11-20T15:09:00.000-08:00

During Priscilla Wald's lecture, when the idea of "biopolitics" and "biopower" came up, I had flashbacks to Marx's idea of the reduction of the industrial wage laborer to a set of basic requirements for life- that a laborer is worth, fundamentally, only the bare minimum to keep him alive and able to produce more. And while Wald's arguments did not veer into Marxist territory, I began to wonder about the idea that "biopolitics" is a reduction of man to his most basic, physical self, giving the physical a strong advantage (and power) over social and cultural forces, and then how this in turn shapes the lives of nations and cultures. For example, restaurants that list nutritional information (or at least calorie counts) for each item on the menu are giving prevalence to quantifiability- that is, when one sees options, they are also shown a collection of objective numbers meant to affect their decision. While I do not mean to imply that this is a bad thing, per se, I am curious as to the intersection between Wald's discussion of scientifically objective models and their place in wider circumstances. For me, this all also related to the Csikszentmihályi lecture when he was discussing the importance of taking into account the social and cultural aspects of technology rather than looking at it purely in terms of the science behind it. I guess my question would be about the possible connections and consequences of certain instances of the "objectification" of information (knowledge), and how it plays into a larger socio-cultural sphere.

Idological Partisanship v. Totalizing Logic

2009-11-20T15:02:00.000-08:00

Priscilla Wald's answer to my question about her language connecting narrative diversity + development with evolution reflected a larger tension I've been thinking about lately. To recap, my question was whether Wald believed that discussing narrative in evolutionary terms gives it a "naturalness" which helps obfuscate the role of active power structures in producing dominant narratives. Wald responded by saying that her definition of "natural" encompasses not just the incidental, passive world (the common view of nature) but also the intentional, active, and technological (the common view of culture/technology)-- Wald stated that things such as biotechnology are, in her mind, a continuation of natural selection and that these forces can be understood as continuous rather than oppositional.

This was interesting to me because:

1) I usually hear arguments that there is no such thing as "natural," that naturalization is a methodological tool used to create ideology (in the Althusserian sense)-- (that the "natural" is the way in which power masquerades as something other than active). This logic/fear is from where my question arose. Wald, however, seemed to reverse this analysis in her response, folding culture into nature rather than vice-versa.

2) I question how productive her definition of "natural" is because of how totalizing it is.

3) I raised my inquiry because I felt that her paper/speech demanded an ethics of narrative management (ie. her statement that nothing is more fluid than narrative, and that nothing is more foundational [in people's lives].) and I fear that her approach to culture/tech as natural, while deliberately allowing room for autonomy/activism, nevertheless creates a causal trope and produces an observational, almost anthropological role for us, through which a critical interaction with narrative production becomes more difficult. If narrative demands an ethics of activism, is Wald's naturalization of its production the most compelling formuation to use towards that end?

Late Post- Week of 11/9/09: Dividuals, Masses, or Masses of Dividuals?

2009-11-20T01:14:00.000-08:00

Tiziana Terranova's Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age shakes the foundations on which “networks,” “information,” and “culture” at-large sit, opening up new potentials for the political. One interesting point she brings up is the fragmentation of information and even the “receivers” of cultural “messages.” To fully demonstrate this Terranova suggests that regarding “the emergence of information as a concept, then should also be related to the development of a set os techniques, including marketing strategies and techniques of communication management – as they attempt to capture the increasing randomness and volatility of culture...messages were not simply directed at groups but tailored to individuals and even sub-individual units (or as Gilles Delueze called them, 'dividuals', what results from the decomposition of individuals into data clouds subject to automated integration and disintegration)” (34).

My question regards the dividual and its relation to the important group or body of the “mass” or “masses.” Terranova suggests the “masses ('you, me and everybody else') are thus not definite sociological categories like classes. The masses are everywhere and in everybody in as much as meaning no longer takes hold. The masses are the place where meanings and ideas lose their power of penetration, the place of fascination and dismediation where all statements, opinions and ideas flow through without leaving a mark. The masses 'disperse' and 'diffuse' meaning, and this is their political power” (138). In what ways is the “mass” as used here similar or different from the “dividual?” What are the problems in conceiving of masses that are inherently not restricted to the sigulars of “you,” “me” and “everybody else,” but to the “data clouds” we are rendered into as “dividuals”?

Late Post- Week of 11/2/09: The Problem of Representing Movements

2009-11-20T00:49:00.000-08:00

Perhaps it is the culture of the United States but I believe the cell phone for a majority does not carry connotations of a political tool or power. Vincent L. Rafael seems to shed light on a historical group and event that in fact did view the cell phone and the communication form of “texting” in such a light. His essay “The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Contemporary Philippines,” “explores,” what he calls “a set of telecommunicative fantasies among middle class Filipinos” (399). These fantasies emerged out of the movement that “overthrew President Joseph Estrada in January 2001,” fantasies that belonged to those who “believed...in the power communication technologies to transmit messages at a distance and in their own ability to posses that power...[to] utilize the power of crowds to speak to the state...they imagined themselves able to communicate beyond the crowd, but also with it, transcending the sheer physical density of the masses through technology” (399). While Rafael is clear that this is a “fantasy” one that engages with the “fetish of communication” for “middle-class demands,” in his descriptions Rafael's text seems to loose its critical edge. Especially in the narrative of one of the “People Power II” crowd's member “Flor C.” These passages while remaining a certain engagement seem to glorify these movements for their potential if nothing else.

This seems especially problematic in that the following crowd the Filipino urban poor is given as an ending anecdote. While it is not simply a question of glorifying the proletariate mass gathering for its own sake (it too as Rafael points out contains many eerie connections to Estrada's party) but that it is given nearly no representation. Put against the middle-class (who seem to be the only subjects who give a narrative in this text) call this mass a “'mob, 'rabble,' or 'horde,'” one must question what it means to represent different and conflicting mass demonstrations (424). What role did the mediation of People Power II both doubling as a historical archive and a political tool play in casting these representative problems?

2009-11-19T21:45:00.000-08:00

Wald's discussion of Octavia Butler's works were very interesting to me because it brought into conflict the theory of evolution, which is a key symbol of modern post-Enlightenment securlarism in society, with another concept associated with secular modern liberalism, the ever elusive 'human rights.'

The strange narrative authority the alien beings exercise on the human race in the name of the 'greater good' certainly seems like an excellent argument against the 'biolization" of human life; however, whats a stake when we remove biology as a fundamental marker of human(s) as both subject and mass. Have we reached full circle in that we should refocus on individual rights as opposed to those of the group? Or has this play between two polar concepts in defining 'human rights' served to undermine the superstructure which each concept (of individual, group, life) is based on?

THE EVOLUTION OF THE RACE NARRATIVE

2009-11-19T21:25:00.000-08:00

Jordan Carter

Professor Wald presented an interesting method for perceiving the race narrative. She conveyed it not as one continuous struggle, but rather as a series of evolving narratives—contingent, but incongruous. I had never considered the abolition movement, the Emancipation Proclamation, Brown vs. The Board of Education, and the contemporary Civil Rights Movement as evolutionary punctuations in the evolution of the race narrative in the US. But after encoding Priscilla Wald's precise rhetoric, hoisted by legitimate examples, even the word's scientific connotations seem applicable. There's always a struggle, but it is never the same struggle—rather, an off-breed. The abolition moment was a narrative of its own, characterized by political campaigns and subversive acts. The Emancipation Proclamation derived from this narrative, but from it another was birthed. Blacks were free, but they were once again constrained by novel adversity in the form of perpetual racism and dwarfed political rights and representation. They may have been off the chain physically, but they were—as Frantz Fanon might put it—"crawl[ing] along. The white gaze, the only valid one...[was] dissecting them" (Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, pg. 95). It's actually quite chilling to reread Fanon after Wald's lecture, and catch some of the scientific connotations. His discussion of the "racial epidermal schema," in its use of 'epidermal'—a word more frequently used in a scientific dialectic than 'skin' or 'flesh.'

Perhaps the skin of the black man has changed via natural selection, constantly forming thicker skin. Those whose epidermal capacities are the strongest can elude the gaze, stand up against the nasty connotations of "blackness" and the "nausea" induced by carrying the "unusual weight" of color prejudice. Indeed, fragments of the hatred of the slave narrative polluted that of he narrative of freedom and equality. Throughout the 20th century, blacks have progressed not in a fluid manner, but in sort of a punctuated equilibrium. Blacks gained the right to go to school with whites, gain equivalent salaries, and today, a black man, Barrack Obama, is the president of the United States—the very country his African American counterparts were enslaved in a priori narrative.

Well it's not like Obama himself was ever enslaved...And his father was a voluntary emigrate, it wasn't like he was brought over here on a slave ship or something....I mean, he is half-white after all.

Woah! The narrative has once again evolved in my opinion. The White Man has historically been theorized to have an affinity for 'The Other,' relegated by repulsion and a desire for consumption—but lately this infamous discourse is being articulated in a new manner. The White Man actually wants a claim in the heritage of the black man, a claim in the very "blackness" he reviled. As Fanon notes in Black Skin White Masks, "For some years now, certain laboratories have been researching for a 'denegrification' serum. In all seriousness they have been rinsing out their test tubes and adjusting their scales and have begun research on how the wretched black man could white himself and thus rid himself of the burden of his bodily curse" During slave times, mulattoes were raped and persecuted as if they were black: even though many, if not most, were the children of their masters. And even today, our "perceptual unconscious" would categorize a dark-skinned mulatto as black. One drop used to be enough to dilute the whole batch. But today the White Man is scrambling to inject himself into the once 'dark abyss' turned golden cell line that is the Obama's heritage. I guess black isn't just black anymore. I guess black is no longer a "bodily [or biological] curse."

"Bloodless Genocide"

2009-11-19T21:12:00.000-08:00

I found Wald's lecture to be very interesting. I've always thought on the role of race within the world, and understanding the biological and social association with race.

However, it appears, society still has not developed a consistent relationship with the word, 'human being'. Wald mentioned that idea of a "bloodless genocide", which occurs through the process of dehumanization. The very society that is the US, was built upon the dehumanization of one population. Firstly, there was a 'social death' amongst the natives, who were colonized and culturally stripped. Then slavery, of course, involved the process of dehumanization.

Now that we can identify the kind of problematic views on words such as 'race' and 'human', what can be done about it? Will we be able to rid society of the idea of 'race' when it is so built into the foundation of our society. While race is not biological, it is so socially involved with society. And laws that we establish to define the term 'human' within the legal system, thus generating an association between socially invented term and biology. This inhibits society from moving away from the idea of race, and completely changing it, because it is so accepted as a biological construct.

Hopefully we will be able to diffuse the actual word 'race' and actually understand the word has no significance without the social construct that we built around it. There is a racial hierarchy only because we, 'humans', created one.

ExtrAct

2009-11-19T20:57:00.001-08:00

The success of civic media projects like the ExtrAct project, according to Chris Csikszentmihályi, relies on the ability to provide information through a navigable visual representation.

“In a contested space, the map is ammunition.”

It is clear that Csikszentmihályi believes in the power of the visual as a means or catalyst for collective action. And to a point, one can say that the ExtrAct project does begin to provide a means for a user to realize their position within a larger schema, offering a new mode of interaction with the conflict.

How does ExtrAct as well as Landman Report Card begin to address its users, both locally and by means of inter/intrastate collective action groups? For as much as the project and the use of Googlemap, address the user as individual, the mapping of natural gas development sites, coupled with the Landman Report Card, users are linked to a network of ‘victims’ or those who have possibly shared similar experiences.

It becomes a means of empowerment, as users/consumers/landowners are no longer isolated in their experience, but are given information and advice from other people who have gone through the same thing.

However, although the mapping of natural gas development creates a network of similar experience, the structure of Landman Report Card only makes possible activism through the local. The Landman Report Card functions as a citizen/consumer watchdog group rather than as a means of collective network. So there are two things that are going on within the project. One, the map, where it begins to create a collectivity around a shared experience or placement of natural gas sites and the other, the Landman Report Card, that address users as empowered through their right to choose. They are produced as both landowner and consumer. What tension is created in their ability to function simultaneously and what does each program with the project open up or inhibit the other’s functions?

Perhaps we can begin to think of Csikszentmihályi’s project as pening up a space that facilitates trajectory through the navigation of the interface, opening up possibilities and new flows and providing new modes of participation. If ExtrAct is seen as merely a tool, and not as a means of solving the conflict, then project begins function as a beginning point of analysis, rather than as an end.

What are the potentialities of interacting with ExtrAct’s interface? Does ExtrAct become a sort of “interface as intervention,” functioning in a different way than something like Google Earth’s treatment of the crisis in Darfur?

Monica

Thoughts on Wald's Lecture

2009-11-19T20:39:00.000-08:00

If someone cuts off your finger and runs away with it, is it a physical assault or a theft? Is an arm a thing? What difference does it make if bodies parts are extracted from cadavres, embryos, or living people? Should we continue to patent and own non-human lifeforms? The person in a position to answer these questions helps dictate the ever-changing narrative Wald stressed so adamantly today.

I was thinking about the above questions in relation to Wald's discussion of 'bioslavery.' Once human body parts are categorized as things and cease to be people, they become suject to the terms of supply and demand. A profitable exchange of human bodies - however fragmented such bodies may be - looks dangerously like slavery. The monetary and intellectual profit reaped from the HeLa cells of Henrietta Lacks or the cancerous spleen cells of John Moore seem to defy moral hesitation in the name of progress, or the common good. Their examples were rationalized as silent, unknowing sacrifices for science in a time when patient rights and protocols of consent were not given significant consideration.

Wald shuns the categorization of the Lacks case as 'bioslavery' and stressed that the real experience of an enslaved person does not resemble the experience of a person from whom cells have been harvested - or any other body part for that matter. I was left wondering at what point do bio-commodities and bio-labor (especially that of surrogate mothers) start to approach bioslavery, if ever?

On another note, Wald's lecture today made me rethink the importance of collective narratives, especially in the case of crimes against humanity, and the legislation that is generated to protect them. In several countries including France, anti-revisionist legislation has been enacted, making it illegal to deny the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity (French Gayssot Act of 1990). In the US, similar legislation would be difficult, if not impossible. To what extent could Wald's call to arms for the productive manipulation of narratives encompass a legal framework?